Universal Forces
by purplepeony
Summary: House and Cuddy deal with the results of their relationship, as begun in Actions and Reactions.
1. Prologue: Evolution

Title: Universal Forces

Author: cschick

Pairing: House/Cuddy

Rating: R

Author's Note: This story is a slight bit of a continuation of my last story (Actions and Reactions), although there's no need to read that story to understand this story.

But as a continuation of my earlier story--it splits from the House universe after the episode Let Them Eat Cake. It makes use of estimates of Cuddy's age that pre-date her claim to being 38 in this current season. This story is also currently unfinished, and I make no promises of finishing it. It's probably about twenty-five percent written, and seventy-five percent plotted.

* * *

Something had either evolved or devolved in their relationship, these past six months.

House sat in the chair in the corner of his bedroom, crushing the tumbled pile of clothing it contained, and stared at the woman sound asleep on his bed. This wasn't the first night that he'd sat here and wondered exactly what they'd gotten themselves into, and he was pretty sure that it wasn't going to be the last.

Six months ago, Cuddy had gained and lost Joy in a single day. Six months ago, he'd gone over to her house--not even sure if he was going to attempt to offer comfort or simply more sarcasm, and he'd followed the instinct and urges he usually strongly suppressed. Five and a half months ago, they'd fought tooth and nail, and she'd come to his house that night to continue the argument. The argument had intensified but rather than her standard retreat--the next morning was the first time he'd woken with her asleep beside him.

It wasn't healthy, their taking the tension and the anger of their arguments and resolving it through an old-fashioned roll in the hay. But he was the master of embracing actions not exactly psychologically healthy.

Cuddy, on the other hand . . . in the past, she'd managed to keep herself on the level. Managed to keep herself from falling into the traps laid by cynicism and bitterness. But not anymore, not with him. He didn't try to pretend to himself that it was anything more--that she wanted to actually be with him for anything more than the sex. That it wasn't purely an indication of the darkness she'd fallen into as well. That it wasn't anything more than an indication that she was falling apart and had given up on holding herself together.

She sighed and rolled over, and her dark hair spread across the pillow. Sleep no longer erased the fine lines drawn on her face by stress and sadness. In fact, as she slept, the masks she presented to others in her life to convince them that she was happy, she was satisfied, she was living the life she wanted to live, fell away. She looked older; she looked sad. She looked lonely.

He didn't want to know how he looked when he was asleep.

Although, one of the things he found curious about the entire situation was that it wasn't just about the sex, as far as he could tell. After each of their tension-fueled sessions, she spent the night. The first time, he'd expected her to up and leave quickly in embarrassment, but she'd curled up beside him and gone to sleep. The next morning, she'd been her standard self, complaining about the lack of food in his kitchen while expertly lobbing away his half-hearted verbal shots, finally taking off for breakfast and home then work before he'd fully woken himself up for the day.

If she had some sort of strange fantasy that was partly fueling this, he wasn't going to try to argue her out of it. Nor did he really want to know about it. It wasn't his issue.

But since the second time she'd spent the night, he'd started keeping some simple breakfast foods in his kitchen--bagels and cream cheese, cereal, milk, coffee. There was no reason that she had to leave hungry. There was no reason she had to leave before sitting down with him for a quick bite to eat.

He limped over to the bed and settled in beside her, not touching, not too close, but not too far away. He didn't understand it, couldn't analyze it, but wasn't going to reject it. Not right now at least.


	2. Chapter 1: So It Begins

The next morning though, she was gone before he was awake. A note on the kitchen counter stated: _Have meeting, need to run. See you later._ He threw on some clothing of questionable cleanliness and then took his bike to work, thinking up ways to torment his fellows today. They had been a bit light on the uncommon recently.

Cuddy caught him soon after he'd entered the building, before he had located any of his targets. That was the other amazing part of this whole situation--here, nothing had changed.

"House, I have a case for you." She followed him as he limped down the hallway to his office.

He shot back his standard response. "Not interested."

"Twenty-three year old woman, stroke, heart failure, no reasons for either . . ."

"Figure out what drugs she's doing."

"Toxicology screen is clean."

"Figure out what drugs she was doing."

He could see Thirteen headed his way down the hall, so he lead Cuddy into his office, listening to her description of the case with half an ear. "She graduated from college last year with top honors, has been gainfully employed until her medical issues began, I doubt she's done enough drugs to cause this type of harm to her body."

"Doesn't take much if it's the right kind . . . "

Cuddy tossed the file down on his desk, and launched into her lecture-mode. "House, you and your team are doing nothing right now except sitting around taking up space . . ."

"They're doing clinic duty, aren't they?"

"You're not doing clinic duty."

"Count theirs as mine. Good managers delegate."

Thirteen had paused outside his office, obviously waiting for Cuddy to finish with him before entering herself. Refusing to rescue him was not an option. He turned back to Cuddy and started "it appears that I have something more important I need to be doing . . . "

That was when he noticed that Cuddy was suddenly leaning for support against the edge of his desk, her full weight braced against a single hand. Her face had turned white and appeared to be trying to gather herself back together against a body determined to fall apart.

"House . . . " she managed in a strained voice, before--despite her efforts--her body simply shut down on her.

He was standing close enough to grab her and attempt to ease her to the floor with him, but caught completely off-balance and with his weight suddenly shifting onto his bad leg, they both went down harder then he wanted. His shoulder struck the side of his desk. Thirteen rushed in, a shocked expression on her face, and he demanded "Get a damned gurney and some nurses, will you?"


	3. Chapter 2: Discovery

The chaos caused by the dean of the hospital suddenly collapsing was something to behold. More people crowded into his office than he liked, and they quickly moved Cuddy to a nearby room. Cameron showed up and took charge of her care, doing a few on-the-spot blood tests and taking a few more vials of blood to send off for more extensive blood panels. He ended up sitting by the side of Cuddy's bed, observing as Cameron inserted an IV and attached a bag of dextrose solution.

A few minutes later, Cuddy slowly opened her eyes.

"Welcome back." Cameron said simply.

Cuddy looked around her, obviously disorientated. "What happened?"

"You collapsed in my office. Give me some warning next time, will you? I'd be better prepared to hide your body."

Cuddy and Cameron both flashed him their own version of the 'shut up, House' look and Cameron danced her pen light across Cuddy's eyes as Cuddy winced. "Dr. Cuddy, you fainted due to low blood sugar. You were at 45, according to a finger prick. When was the last time you ate?"

Cuddy thought for a moment. "Dinner last night. I had a salad with chicken about 7pm."

"No breakfast this morning?"

Her eyes darted sideways to House and a faint blush colored her face. "I had an early meeting and was running late. I meant to grab something, but was feeling a bit queasy and not very hungry. So I didn't."

Cameron shook her head. "It shouldn't have been enough to drop your blood sugar to those levels, but if you've got a virus coming on, skipping breakfast could have done it. We're waiting on the rest of your blood results, but I think that the first order of business is to find you some food."

Cameron called for one of the nurses and asked her to find a lunch tray for Cuddy.

Cuddy looked toward House and asked, "Do you have that file I trying to give to you?"

"I think it landed on the floor of my office when the dean of medicine collapsed and took us both down."

She sighed and rubbed one hand across her forehead. Probably a headache from the hypoglycemia. "Could you just look at the file? I don't feel like arguing about it any further."

"Then don't" he snapped back. Sure, he'd take a look at the file, in his own good time. The girl was in the hospital, under the best supervision possible. And if she'd fucked up her own body through drug use--which he suspected--well, they could figure out how to mitigate that damage later. This was proving to be far more interesting. He refused to admit any other reason that he'd want to stick around, even to himself.

"House, maybe you should leave?" Cameron frowned at him and tried to communicate her strongest 'get the fuck out of here' via the expression on her face. He could read it just fine, but he just didn't feel inclined to follow the demand. "I think that I'm just fine here," he said, leaning back in the bedside chair.

A nurse came through the door, wheeling a cart with a covered lunch try, paperwork stacked on top. "Lunch, and some preliminary results are back" she said briskly, pushing the cart up by the side of the bed and evading House's grab for the results by handing them to Cameron.

"Quick service," he remarked.

"Only the best for Dr. Cuddy" the nurse responded with a straight face, and whished out of the room before he decided what the hell that was supposed to mean.

He watched her face as Cameron read through the results. He could--and had always been able to--know if the results were good news, bad news, or no news based on the expression flickering across her face. She couldn't suppress her emotions worth a damn.

Her lips quirked, and she narrowed her eyes and glanced quickly at Cuddy then at House. Okay, not no news. But she was going to ask him to leave again.

"House, I really think that you should go now."

Cuddy sighed. "Dr. Cameron, just tell me what's wrong. If House doesn't find out now, he'll break into records to find out tonight."

Or he'd simply torment her until she told. Cuddy couldn't keep a secret worth a damn, either. At least from him.

Cameron once again glanced at House and then passed the piece of paper to Cuddy. Cuddy scanned through it quickly, wincing as her eyes glided across the confirmation of her low blood glucose levels, then stopping quite suddenly on another line. She let out a sigh. "I'm not sure I believe this."

House had finally had enough. He snatched the lab results out of Cuddy's hand--not that she attempted to resist--and read the results for himself. Normal, normal, low blood sugar . . . hCG levels of 15,754 mIU/ml.

"I thought I'd noticed a strange glow around you recently. I was attributing it to something involving an alliance with the devil, but apparently that wasn't the cause."

"House . . . " Cameron rolled her eyes at him again. "Well, we've got the probable reason for the unusual blood glucose drop. But you weren't expecting this result?"

"Dr. Cameron, I've been believed to be perimenopausal for two years. No, I wasn't expecting to find out I was pregnant."

"When was your last menstrual period?"

"Seven months ago. And I doubt that I'm seven months pregnant."

A slight smile quirked the corners of Cameron's mouth. "I doubt that too. Do you have any idea when conception might have occurred?"

This time, Cuddy somehow avoided looking at him. Her control impressed him, because some part of his brain was trying to engage in a fit of hysterics.

"There are several different possibilities."

"Well, you're going to need a dating ultrasound to determine your due date. Do you want me to schedule one for you upstairs today, or do you want to wait until you've gotten an appointment with your OB?"

"Why don't you schedule one for me today?"

"Eat your lunch, relax a bit, and I'll see what they can do. We'll do another finger prick test in an hour or so, and if your glucose levels are normal, I'll release you. But I'll want you to take it easy for the rest of the day."

"Well ladies, since I believe we are done here, I think I'll be leaving."

"Keep your mouth shut, House," Cameron warned him.

"Who would believe me?" And he escaped from the room before either of them decided to engage in some physical violence on his person. Even he knew when things were about to cross that line.


	4. Chapter 3: A Bit Human

About two hours later, after sending Taub and Thirteen off to investigate that 23-year-old woman's apartment for drug or evidence of drug use, he swung by Cuddy's office. She was in there, staring blindly at some piece of paperwork. In the five minutes he watched her from outside, the piece of paper she was apparently giving her complete concentration to didn't change, and her eyes didn't even move as though she was reading.

He entered the room, and she jerked back into the real world.

"House, will you someday learn to knock? I was focusing."

"Not on that, you weren't." He gestured at the paper. "Don't we need to talk?"

"Do we need to talk?" she queried, looking him straight in the eye. "Maybe you're not the only guy I'm screwing."

"I know you're not a liar, Cuddy. You told me you were clean. If you were sleeping around, you wouldn't have told me that, and we'd be using condoms."

"Maybe I am a liar. Really, how much do you know about the current me?"

"Is there really that much to know?"

She deflated, and that silent little voice he would love to lose echoed in his head "too far . . " So, he kept his mouth shut and just waited.

"You didn't wonder why I wasn't concerned about--" she waved her hands in a general manner, unable to say the words "when I told you not to bother?"

"I presumed you'd taken other precautions. Or maybe, I figured it didn't quite matter anymore."

"Didn't quite matter anymore is about right."

He waited.

"Remember when you accused me of giving up--of giving up on adoption as easily as I'd given up on IVF--"

And less than ten seconds later, he'd ended up kissing her? "Yes."

"The reason I gave up, as you so kindly put it . . . was that after three cycles with the best fertility drugs on the market, my body just didn't want to do it. There's nothing like going in for that ultrasound only to be told that there's nothing developing, no hope for that entire cycle." She paused and looked down at her desk, tracking her fingers along the wood grain.

"After three of those, I realized there's no reason to keep putting myself through that, keep wasting the money. I opted out when they started to try to guide the conversation to the topic of donor eggs.

"And then Joy . . . even that failed. Something in life is trying to tell me that I'm not ever going to be a mother. I can't think that this is real, because it most likely is not."

Her shoulders slumped and she looked up at him despondently. "Even if it's not an ovarian cyst raising my hCG without pregnancy, even if my body has remarkably done something that all indications say it can't do anymore--what are the chances that it's just a blighted ovum or molar pregnancy? I told Cameron to schedule the ultrasound because I need it over with. I need the bad news now--before I can delude myself into hope."

"Women in their 40s can have healthy pregnancies, Cuddy."

"Not women who expected to be declared as being in menopause in the next four months, House."

He could have come out with a snappy retort--something about the 'twins' being too perky to be put out to pasture yet was on the tip of his tongue--but he bit it back. There was no fun in tormenting an already destroyed and grieving Cuddy.

That pesky more human side of him gained control for a moment. "Do you want me to come with you?" 


	5. Chapter 4: Confirmation

At 2pm that afternoon, the two of them walked silently into the radiology suites located on the maternity unit. Dr. Bowman, the hospital's resident perinatologist, was pacing by the check in desk while the receptionist behind it cast annoyed glances in his direction.

"Dr. Cuddy!" he exclaimed as soon as he spotted them. "Come right back with me, we are ready for you."

He wrinkled his nose and continued, "House, you can wait out here. You don't need to be interfering with me doing my job."

"I'm not sure that interference would be a bad thing. How many lawsuits have been brought against you in the past five years?" Several heavily pregnant patients in the waiting area suddenly perked up.

"House!" Cuddy hissed. "Dr. Bowman, it's fine if he comes in with me. In fact, I asked him to come with me. Moral support, you know."

"House?" Bowman looked like he might have other opinions to offer on that choice, but either his deference to a hospital administrator or his superbly slimy bedside manner shut him down. "If that's what you want, Dr. Cuddy."

But as Cuddy proceeded them both into the hallway behind the desk, Bowman cast House another threatening look. The males of the pack are already starting to close protectively around the pregnant alpha female, House noted to himself. The next few months should be interesting around the hospital . . .

* * *

A nurse took Cuddy's blood pressure and helped her get settled comfortably into the reclining chair. As the nurse blatantly ignored him,House located the other chair on the right side of Cuddy's, near her head, and heaved himself awkwardly into it. The whole setup wasn't very handicapped-accessible, he noted to himself.

"So, I understand we're just looking to do a dating ultrasound?" Bowman asked cheerfully. "I'll start with an abdominal ultrasound, but we may have to move onto the transvaginal ultrasound if it's still too early and your uterus is too low to be imaged properly without it. You have a full bladder?"

"You need a patient's help to get your job done properly?"

Bowman shot House another look. "You sure you want him here?"

"House, stop. Dr. Bowman, I'm well aware of the recommendations for an early ultrasound."

"Well, then let's get this show on the road."

Bowman smoothed the gel across Cuddy's exposed abdomen, and placed the blunt end of the ultrasound wand against her. "Okay, let's see what we've got here . . . well, hello there!"

The standard ultrasound profile of a fetus appeared. The standard ultrasound profile of a much-older-than-expected fetus. As both Cuddy and House watched in silent shock, Bowman quickly captured a few measurements and his computer popped up the estimates for each . . . 17w4d, 18w1d, 17w5d .

House grinned. "Cuddy, you've had a parasite sharing personal space with you for four months and had no idea?"

Cuddy's face was a study in shock and amazement. A tear slipped from the corner of the eye nearest House, and she remained silent.

Bowman studied the image and results intently, and then turned his attention to Cuddy. "Since you're already here and it appears that it's about the right time, do you want me to take the measurements needed for the Down's screening and the anatomy scan?"

Cuddy looked away from the screen for a moment and seemed to bring herself back from whatever altered mental plane the shock had sent her to. "Sure." she choked out, then returned her eyes to the screen.

Bowman busied himself with the computer and wand, concentrating on capturing the angles and structures he needed.

Cuddy's right hand lay between her and House, on an area of her chair blocked from Bowman's direct line of sight by her body. House leaned forward slightly, adjusting himself for a seemingly better view of the computer screen Bowman was interacting aggressively with, and gently touched the back of Cuddy's hand with his fingertips. To his surprise, she reacted by grasping his hand tightly.

And, he realized, she was trembling.

* * *

When they left the office together about 50 minutes later, Cuddy paused. "House, will you come down to my office with me?"

He leaned in slightly and said quietly "Wow, Cuddy, I've heard that pregnant women can get horny . . . but on hospital property?"

"We have to talk."

"You didn't want to talk earlier. And now, I've got things to do, places to be. I'm going to miss my soap if I don't get down to the lounge in the next 5 minutes. Apparently Krystal's near-fatal accident has left her with extensive memory loss . . . "

"And that's more important . . ."

"Than an issue that has months left on its expiration date? Definitely."

He limped away from her, almost daring her to follow him. He wasn't quite sure what he'd do if she insisted on following him. He didn't think that this was a conversation she wanted to be having through the hallways of her own hospital, but if she pushed him right now . . .

When he reached the elevator, he looked back to see her standing exactly where he'd left her, an almost bemused expression on her face.

Good, she wasn't angry. Not yet at least.

Or maybe, damn, she wasn't angry.

He didn't know which was better right now.

The elevator door closed.


	6. Chapter 5: Spreading the News

House clumped his way into Wilson's office and plopped himself down on the couch. "So, did you hear the news?"

Wilson looked up from the paperwork he filing and answered with a sigh, "What news?"

"Cameron hasn't been up here to give you the latest juicy tidbits of gossip winding their way through the hospital halls?"

"Cameron doesn't gossip, and no, I haven't seen her today."

"Cuddy's finally got herself the parasite she's always dreamed of."

Wilson paused a moment to decipher that statement. House watched in delight as the realization colored his face. "Cuddy's . . . pregnant?"

"That's the word around the hospital this fine day."

"House, what did you do? Break into the medical records at her OB's office?"

"Cameron gossips with me, if not with you."

"Cuddy's pregnant." He paused again, as if it was as unexpected the second time he'd said it as the first. "Well, I hope she's happy. You know that I now have to wait until she tells me to say anything, right? Damn you."

"Just sharing the happy news. Another life being brought into our overcrowded and resource-limited world."

"House, shut up. And don't you dare say anything like that to her. You know, she told me that you said you thought she'd be a wonderful mother."

"Only after I said that I thought she'd be an terrible mother."

"Make up your mind, will you? And get out of here. I have to finish this up before my next appointment . . ." he glanced at his watch "in seven minutes. Get out of here."

House exited, humming the tune to Rock-a-by-baby.

* * *

About two hours later, Wilson knocked on the door to Cuddy's office. She looked up from the same paperwork that had been in front of her for most of the afternoon and sighed. She knew that this was going to come. In everything else she'd done baby-related, he'd been the first to know, the first to help. Not this time.

"Lisa . . . " he started, and paused. She could tell that he was trying to get her to say it. House hadn't been able to keep his mouth shut.

"House told you?" she asked, leaving her face an expressionless mask.

"It's true?"

"I'm pregnant." It was the first time she'd actually said the words out loud--and she realized that she'd said them like she barely believed them herself. Her face softened into a involuntary smile, and she repeated more strongly. "I'm pregnant."

"How did he find out?"

"He didn't tell you?"

"He was going on about something related to Cameron . . ."

Ah damn. She'd forgotten. Cameron, the hospital lab, any nurse on that floor that decided to take a peek into her file. This wasn't going to be secret for too long.

"Cameron and House were there when I found out."

He gave her a puzzled look. "Exactly how were Cameron and House there when you found out?"

"I fainted this morning due to low blood sugar, and per recommendations, Cameron ran the pregnancy test along with the other blood work."

"You just found out this morning, here? Then it wasn't another IVF attempt?"

"No." So, apparently House had told Wilson . . . close to nothing. She didn't know whether to be pleased or disturbed. She had half-expected over the past several months that House was soon going to spill the beans to Wilson about their on-and-off . . . sessions . . . if only to give him something to be annoying about.

He raised his hands and looked at her in confusion. Up until recently, he'd been her first and best confidant. Up until just after Joy. When she decided that what she needed wasn't a confidant. She turned away from him and looked out the window.

"About 4 months ago, I had a one-night stand . . . " she began.

"You had unprotected sex with a one-night stand?"

She shrugged. "We're all stupid sometimes."

"Not generally that stupid."

"It's over and done with. I don't even know the man's name."

She could almost feel him studying her back. She turned her head back to look at him, and could see the mixture of worry and disgust in his eyes. Well, if House didn't want to claim responsibility, that was just fine with her. All of her plans up until this point had involved her going it alone.

"I know you've not quite been yourself recently . . . " Wilson began, but then he stopped himself. "I guess I should just say Congratulations?"

"I'll take that, " she smiled at him, and he smiled back. She ignored whatever confusion still colored that smile.

"You want to tell me anything more?"

* * *

Later that evening, Cameron dropped by Wilson's office before she headed home. She had been stopping in every couple of evenings since his return, checking in on him, offering him the opportunity to talk if he needed it.

She couldn't imagine how hard it must be for him to return to a place so associated with his relationship with Amber. She'd not been able to do it: she'd fled from all the places associated with her marriage. But she did know that even in fleeing, she hadn't escaped from those memories, from the overwhelming darkness they could bring suddenly and unexpectedly. And she also remembered how difficult it had been to reach out to anyone when those moods descended. She couldn't be there all the time, but she could check in on him.

And especially today. Nobody in the hospital could miss that Wilson had some sort of crush on Cuddy. An unreciprocated crush, almost definitely. She wondered what he had heard, how he had reacted.

Wilson smiled when she appeared at his door, and swung his feet down off his desk. As far as she could tell, he'd been leaning back, staring off into space.

"How was your day?" she asked brightly.

"Pretty boring, until the news of the day."

"Ah, so you know."

"Yeah." He shook his head. "Do you think she's okay?"

"Dr. Cuddy? Well, I think she was more shocked than even I was when the results came back. But she's wanted this, hasn't she?"

"She'd given up, as far as she'd let on to me."

"Sometimes, life surprises you after you've given up all hope."

Wilson frowned, and said "That's what worries me. How much hope did she give up?"

"Well, apparently she's been sleeping with someone."

"Or someones."

Cameron let out a short laugh. "Someones? Cuddy doesn't seem to be the type to go around tumbling into the beds of random strangers."

"She told me the pregnancy was the result of a one-night stand. Unprotected sex and a one-night stand."

Damn it. There were things she didn't want to know about Cuddy's life, and now she had just too much information.

Wilson had obviously seen her react to his statement. "What do you know?"

"When I asked her if she had a guess as to when conception might have occurred, she told me she didn't because there were multiple possibilities."

"She's at 17 weeks."

"17 weeks? Seriously?"

"17 weeks and she didn't know. Didn't know when, doesn't know who. That sound like the Lisa Cuddy you know?"

"Maybe we don't know her as well as we thought."

"Or maybe we've been ignoring it as she's started to spin out of control. She's a little more subtle about it than House. But she hasn't been herself, really, since what happened with Joy."

"Well, she's got the perfect reason to get herself back into control."

"I certainly hope so."

"Wilson, it's Cuddy. She will."

He shrugged, and Cameron could understand the guilt that was driving his worry. He wasn't going to stop, now that he realized she had broken, he was going to try to fix her. Even if she didn't need fixing now.

Well, at least it would give him something to think about besides Amber.

* * *

Author's note: okay, now we've gotten to the end of what I've previously written and recently edited. And now that it is all out there, I am hoping that my guilt will drive me forward, continuing to write more.


	7. Chapter 6: Connection

So, here's the chapter that's been driving me nutty. I hope you enjoy . . .

* * *

As the news of her pregnancy spread through the hospital rumor mill, the ranks closed around Cuddy. The doctors, nurses, and other staff were determined to protect her, even from her standard annoyances like House. Cuddy herself didn't seem too interested in seeking him out, either. House found himself and his team even more isolated than normal.

Not that he really wanted to engage her, either. House knew that there was a conversation wanting, a conversation he didn't especially want to have. As long as they didn't talk about it, he didn't have to make any decisions about it. And if Cuddy wasn't going to force him to take any responsibility, he certainly didn't plan to volunteer. Only martyrs and idiots volunteered.

For the next two weeks, watching the staff of Princeton-Plainsboro run interference was pleasure enough. Mass quantities of both usual and unusual files made their way to his office through various channels, and piled up in odd places in his office. Foreman and the team worked a couple of the files as their guilt over the ever-growing piles tormented them, and did some clinic hours, but House saw nothing come by that interested him enough to stir himself to the white board. Too many silly questions, too many easy answers. Too many other doctors in the hospital suddenly refusing to use their brains and their knowledge and intentionally lobbing off the files when they first looked the slightest bit complex.

That file that Cuddy had attempted to drop off on that fateful day proved to be mainly what he'd predicted—an odd reaction to drugs cut with some nasty chemicals never intended for ingestion by the human body, chemicals which had taken up residence in her body fat for several months before working their charms on her body due to several weeks on a fad liquid diet. The team had gotten her on dialysis to protect her kidneys and detoxify her blood, and she'd left the hospital a hopefully less stupid twenty-something. Maybe at least she would stop ingesting drugs from unknown sources, in her quest to blotto her brain and forget her life. Or maybe she'd just stop crash-dieting.

But his changed circumstances eventually began to more annoy than delight him. Wilson had appointed himself protector of the queen, and spent far too much time hovering around Cuddy. He'd started fetching their lunches from expensive places other than the hospital cafeteria, leaving House with nobody to leech from in the lunch line.

Just the lack of Cuddy in his day-to-day life began to wear on him in unexpected ways. In their five and a half months of occasional screwing and bed-sharing, he believed that he hadn't allowed himself to fall into expecting that it might continue. But this soon became an absolute drought—no Cuddy at home, no Cuddy-the-dictator at work. True, he was trying to stay out of her way. But he hadn't realized how often their daily work encounters had come from her placing herself in his way, until she stopped.

And even though he half-suspected it would never happen again, he found himself sometimes listening for a late night knock on his door, found himself falling asleep too often on his couch. Found himself still purchasing fresh breakfast foods and keeping his fridge from becoming a wasteland of forgotten food and a science experiment of growing molds.

But he couldn't bring himself to change the status quo. So, when Cameron brought him the first interesting case he'd seen in weeks, he figured it was time to force Cuddy to change it.

When House finally decided on an unorthodox course of treatment for the patient suffering from ongoing, agonizing, apparently phantom pains in his limbs, he both did so out of the belief it was the only course of action remaining to help his patient, and out of his desire to see if he could stir Cuddy herself from behind her wall of defenders.

First, Foreman had held his own against House, arguing his own theories and presenting his own ideas about treatment, for far longer than House expected. In fact, desperation elevated Foreman to new heights of imagination and conclusion, and House let the conversation go on longer than normal just to keep him going. Ten hours earlier, some of Foreman's ideas might have been worth pursing. He filed some of them away for future consideration for other patients.

Then, Cameron had appeared, tried to lay claim to the patient, and presented her case against his treatment. But she had no new ideas and he soon chased her out of his office with her tail between her legs.

Chase shrugged at him in the hallway and declared "You're a brilliant idiot, and I don't care."

Wilson then showed up and presented his ideas about micro-tumors and other possible cancerous causes, despite the team having ruled them out about twenty hours earlier. House played him for a while, until Wilson threw up his hands and proclaimed "I've done all I can do," and stormed out.

Unfortunately, by this time, it was past six-thirty in the evening, and Cuddy on her pregnant-administrator schedule was supposedly gone for the day. He instructed his team and the nurses to prep the patient for brain surgery first thing in the morning, and left with their last protests echoing unheard in his ears.

Just before nine that evening, he found himself sitting at his piano, drifting his way through some half-remembered music, his mind only slightly blurred by the combination of Scotch and vicodin with hamburger he'd consumed for dinner. He hadn't heard any sounds at his door, until he heard the key turning in the lock. He glanced over, confirmed that the chain was loose, and continued playing.

Seconds later, she was standing in the open doorway, holding up his spare key in one hand. "So, had you noticed it was missing?" she asked.

"I figured that the mice had taken it. They sometimes get locked out when the association's pest control plugs up their holes."

She rolled her eyes, tucked it back into her purse, and then entered and shut the door. He continued playing idly, but gave her a good once-over. With a few more weeks and the consumption of some non-rabbit food, she might actually be described as having a slightly pregnant—or oddly pudgy—shape.

"So, what the hell are you up to?" she asked, as she came over to stand by the side of the piano.

"Preventing my patient from living a life of absolute and uncontrollable pain, maybe preventing him from offing himself."

"Sympathy leads to insanity, then? I'll have to remember that."

"It will work."

"It is an idiotic course of treatment."

"It will work," he stated again, more firmly.

"Or just finish the job for him," she sighed. "Unfortunately, I think you're right."

"Unfortunately? Isn't this what you keep me on staff for? Being the one that makes the right decisions."

"Being the one whose insanity is occasionally tempered by a decent chance of being right."

"Insanity and genius go hand-in-hand." He paused his playing for a moment, rested his hands on the piano's top, and looked directly at her. "If you think I'm right, why are you here?"

"I needed to see you to know whether you thought you were right, or you were gaming me."

"You could have done that nine hours ago rather than wasting a trip over here."

"They wouldn't let me."

He almost grinned at the whining edge to her voice. "It's your hospital."

"Right now, I wonder . . ." For a brief moment, she stared off into the distance, her eyes unfocused. But she quickly shook off whatever had distracted her, squared her narrow shoulders, and looked pointedly at him. He knew it was time for this, although that still didn't make him any happier about it. The past couple weeks of waiting and thinking hadn't really helped him come up with any answers, any reaction other than shock and disbelief.

She sat down on the edge of the piano bench, her face somber, and continued "also, don't we have other things we need to talk about?"

"That's your call." He glanced down at the keys and returned to trying to play, his fingers creating some type of unrecognizable and unorganized melody.

"Mine? I recall that you were the one who put off the conversation last time around."

He looked down at his traitorous hands, then at her, and admitted, "I'm not sure what I should say."

He saw her visibly tense in reaction to that statement, and turn her head away from him. "You don't have anything to say," she stated flatly.

"I didn't say that I don't have anything to say. I said I'm not sure what I should say."

"This is an awful time for you to magically gain a verbal filter."

He stopped playing, turned toward her, and almost pleaded "Tell me what you want me to say, Cuddy."

She turned back toward him, and he could see that her eyes were too bright, the soft light in his apartment reflecting off tears she refused to shed. "I want you to say whatever you want to say."

"What? That I'm scared shitless here? That's a fairly useless piece of information."

She quirked her lips and raised her eyebrows. "It's a start. Not quite the start I expected."

"Hell, I'm not even sure of that. It isn't quite something I ever thought about."

"What, that you'd have a kid?"

"That I'd have a kid I knew anything about."

She pursed her lips, and commented, "that's a depressing idea."

He shrugged and turned his head away from her slightly. "It's not like I was regularly having sex with anyone who'd know or care enough to tell me about it." She could take that comment however she liked.

"We both got ourselves into this."

"We certainly did."

"You regret it?" she asked softly, raising her eyebrows.

He thought about it again for a brief moment, staring at the woman in front of him, and came up with the same answer he'd been finding for the past two weeks. "Not really." If any woman was going to be having his baby, Cuddy at least might have the guts to deal with the kid for 18 years and remain sane. Whether he was involved or not.

"That's good to know." She almost succeeded at hiding the relief in her voice, but he knew her too well.

"I think you hold all the cards here, Cuddy. You've wanted a kid, you're getting a kid. Does it really matter whether it's my kid?"

"He," she corrected. "He's your kid, too."

Just that made it all suddenly more real, made the concept that this would all eventually result in a crying, squirming baby more solid. "He? You sure of that?"

"As you know, it wasn't clear on the initial ultrasound, but I got the amino results back a few days ago."

"Ah." He paused, and gathered himself together again. "Well, does it matter whether he's my kid?"

"I . . ." she hesitated and turned away from him again. "I can do it alone, House. I've planned to do it alone. But, there's this part of me that says that you deserve the chance to be involved to whatever degree you think you can be involved. I'm not expecting you to become some ideological father figure here."

"I don't know that I could be any sort of father figure here, Cuddy."

"I think you underestimate yourself."

"I think you overestimate me."

"Overestimating motivates you to new heights . . . of something. Damn it, House."

She moved back toward him, leaned forward and placed one of her hands on top of his. "I don't want you to feel like I'm cutting you out, I don't want you to feel like you're expected to take on some role you're not able to play. I want you to stay here, be you, be involved to whatever degree you can be involved. That's all."

The fear reared its ugly head, and he blurted out. "Even with just those expectations, you're headed toward disappointment. I can't promise that I won't disappoint you."

"You disappoint me less than you think you do." An odd smile flashed across her face and she lifted her chin slightly.

When she had leaned forward, she had intentionally moved into his personal space, her face almost too close to his. When she lifted her chin, she triggered the reaction.

The desires, the instincts he had once carefully suppressed whenever they had ended up in such close proximity, pushed their way to the surface, freed from their old constraints by their odd relationship of the past several months. Before he could even process the response to suppress it, he caught her lips in a kiss.

She gasped, then closed her eyes and deepened the kiss, bringing her hands behind his head and pulling him closer to her. He lost himself in the warmth of her breath, the softness of her lips. He knew that he had missed this over the past several weeks, missed the feeling of her lips against his, the feeling that maybe there was something here, something driving whatever this was.

After a few breathless moments, she finally pulled back. Her lips were slightly swollen, her chin slightly reddened by the roughness of his scruffy beard against her skin. Her eyes were slightly dilated, and she was breathing heavily. "House, what _is _this?" she asked softly, echoing the question that had been haunting him for months.

"I don't know," he responded, and felt himself almost forced to continue "but I don't want it to stop."

One of those intense smiles he saw so rarely brightened her face, she put her arm around his waist, and laid her head against his shoulder. "God, we are so screwed up."

"We are what we are."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want you to stay," he admitted softly.

She didn't answer, but she didn't move away either. For several long moments, they remained there, seated side-by-side on his piano bench, bodies pressed against one another at leg, hip, shoulder, just breathing.

Then she hooked her fingers under the waistband of his jeans, and drew them across his back as she suddenly moved away. "If I'm going to stay, maybe we should move somewhere more comfortable?"

He swallowed hastily as the sexy, aggressive Cuddy who had driven their relationship these past six months suddenly emerged. As she stood next to the piano bench, smiling down at him, he had to admit that right now at least, the added softness of pregnancy had only enhanced everything that drove him crazy. A bit more roundness at her hip, a bit more fullness at her breasts . . .

She turned to walk toward his bedroom, and he heaved himself to his feet to follow, his eyes happily tracking her her still-perfect ass.


	8. Chapter 7: Comfort

Cuddy stopped just inside of the doorway to his bedroom, off to one side of the stream of light across the floor from the distant living room light, her form almost completely vanishing into the dusky grayness. She captured him as he followed her through the door, pulling him toward her and shutting the door behind him, leaving them in almost complete darkness.

He accepted the armful of Cuddy, his lips finding hers while his fingertips located the hook and zipper for her skirt. As they kissed one another frantically, lips and tongue battling, he loosened her skirt and pushed it down over her hips. She shrugged her hips and legs slightly, helping the skirt fall to the floor, then kicked it off to the side.

His fingers slid underneath the waistband of her panties and then further down, caressing the smooth skin. She took advantage of the extra support, wrapping her legs around his waist as he leaned back against the door to support the extra weight, bringing her face almost level with his. For a moment they stopped kissing and he opened his eyes, finding her face so close that he could see her features even despite the room's darkness. She panted for a moment as they locked eyes, then moaned and tossed her head back as he gave her ass a firm squeeze. His leg sent up a warning twinge.

"While I like what I'm holding here, I can't do this for long," he said in a low tone.

She smiled slightly, then slid her legs down the sides of his until she was standing on her own again. Damn the weakness of his leg. He had a brief flash of that long ago day when he had carried her across another room, to another bed. But he returned to the present as she stepped backwards to his current bed, her fingers drawing the bottom edge of his t-shirt upwards.

With her help, he quickly pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it off into the darkness to join her skirt on the floor, then followed her lead to the side of his bed. Somehow, they ended up tangled together side-by-side on his bed, his hands under her blouse, her hands down the back of his pants, their lips kissing whatever skin was available. While he focused on trailing a path of kisses from her lips to her ear, her hands fumbled at the waist of his jeans, unbuttoning and unzipping them, allowing her access.

He froze as she gently cupped him, feeling the heat of her hand through the thin fabric of his boxers. She let out a laugh, then helped him wiggle out of the restriction of his jeans and boxers. As he felt the warmth of her hand and her inner thighs against him, he whispered "you're still wearing too much."

He tried to find the small buttons of her blouse, but in the darkness, they eluded him. Instead, he pulled the blouse up and over her head--suddenly registering one of the advantages of low cut blouses--and then released her breasts from the confines of her bra. He took one in each hand, stopping everything else for the moment to consider their weight and roundness, then flicked his thumbs across her nipples.

She gasped, and her hips thrust forward against him. "Sensitive, are they?" he asked, and traced his thumbs around the outlines of her aureole, feeling the skin tighten as she moaned.

Her hands came up and gently halted his. "More so than usual," she admitted.

He moved his hands downward, trailing his thumbs over smooth skin of her chest, down to the gentle swell of her belly. He stopped there for a long moment, his hands gently resting against her skin, as he once again was hit with reality of the situation. Feeling the changes of her belly, discovering with his hands and fingers how over the past few weeks it had become rounder; softer in a way, firmer in another way . . .

Under his thumb and palm, he suddenly felt the slightest bit of a flutter, so light and brief he could almost tell himself that he imagined it. But that part of his brain which had always driven him to isolation suddenly reasserted itself with a moment of panic and gibberish. He froze and his breath caught. While under other circumstances he could have come out with all sorts of medical details about a 20 week fetus, including the knowledge that being able to feel some movement externally was not at all unusual, all his brain could suddenly process at the moment was utter fear-driven gibberish.

As he paused for a moment too much, Cuddy stilled too. "House?" she asked quietly.

He breathed away the panic, and moved his whole palm to rest gently against her belly. He felt nothing more than the softness of her bare skin, the warmth of her body. "Have you started to . . . feel anything?"

Her hand joined his. "Sometimes. Maybe." She said quietly. "Little things that could be kicks, or maybe not. Did you feel something?"

"Maybe." They both just breathed for a moment, their fingers overlapping one another as their palms rested on her belly. Nothing more occurred.

She intertwined her fingers with his, pulling his hand away from her belly, and she let out a low laugh. "Don't worry, in a few weeks we'll both have felt it happen so often it'll be _passé_."

He processed the assumptions of that statement, and repeated "we'll both have?"

"We'll both have." Cuddy repeated it softly, squeezing his his hand for emphasis.

He felt his face stretch in a small half-grin, and kissed her again. She returned the kiss enthusiastically, and he again slid his hands lower, catching his thumbs in the waist of her lacy panties, and then sliding them down her legs. She kicked them off and they disappeared into the tangle of sheets at the bottom of his bed.

As he drew his hands back up her legs, he allowed his fingers to brush over her, discovering just how ready she already was. He traced his fingers along her moist folds, rubbing gently against her clitoris, dipping his fingers inside but withdrawing quickly, until she was rocking against him, moaning, demanding.

"House, please . . . "

Easing himself inside her, he allowed her to set the pace, slowly moving deeper, deeper as she moved her hips against him and drew him inside. She was already deep within her pursuit of her own pleasure, her body's desires directing her actions, driving her movement, and he held himself back until she grabbed his hips with her hands, pulling him as deeply inside her as their position permitted.

"More . . . " she gasped, and the sound of her plea broke through his self-control.

He thrust forward roughly, penetrating as deeply as their bodies allowed, and she groaned in response, her fingernails digging into his skin as she held him there for a moment. Then, realizing that his own end was quickly approaching, he set a fast pace, entering as deeply as possible and withdrawing almost completely each time. Her hips matched him thrust for thrust, grinding against him when they were fully engaged; her hands pulling him back again each time he withdrew.

She suddenly stilled, her body tensing under him as he entered again, then she tightened around him as she screamed with pleasure, bucking wildly against him. He rode out her waves of pleasure and responded, falling over his own edge. He exploded inside her, then held himself still for a moment as his mind blanked under the onslaught.

He collapsed onto the mattress beside her, exhausted, their legs still entangled. She lay still, breathing deeply and roughly. They were so close together, he could see her face even despite the lack of light, her closed eyes, her parted lips. She slowly opened her eyes and looked toward him, then traced her fingers down the side of his face, through his stubble, and across his lips.

"House . . ." she said, then hesitated. "Thank you."

She kissed him again, barely brushing her lips across his, then disentangled her legs and vanished from his bed. When she left the room, she left the door open, allowing the distant light from the lamp in the living room back in. While the light spilled across their rumpled clothing on the floor, the sheets pushed to the foot of the bed, he listened to the her soft sounds from the bathroom, the flush of the toilet, the rush of the water in the sink. Before she returned she turned off the lamp and he lay in darkness again.

She knew how to locate certain things in his bedroom and apartment even despite the darkness--an idea that would have scared him senseless had it been anyone else. After her soft footsteps reentered the room, he heard the sound of a dresser drawer open, and he knew it was the drawer in which he kept clean t-shirts. She returned to bed as silently as she had left, now smelling of the odd combination of her scents, mixed with the scent of his generic detergent clinging to the fabric of the t-shirt she had snagged.

She took her spot on the other side of the bed, as he shifted back to his. She then reached out, touched his arm, and said in a low voice "Goodnight, House."

"Night," he echoed back, and she sighed. She nestled down into the mattress, and within minutes, he could hear her breathing settle into the regular pattern of sleep.

He envied her that--sleep rarely came so easily for him. But, after a few minutes of listening to nothing but the sounds of her soft breathing, he too found himself drifting off.

Early in the morning, when the first light of dawn brightened the room, he woke again for a moment and felt her side of the bed, worried that the previous night had all been a dream. But she was still there, facing away from him and curled on her left side, a pillow tucked against her.

He rolled toward her, put one arm over her, and tucked his nose into the hair at the nape of her neck, inhaling again that odd mix of their combined scents. Even though he hadn't intended to, he again fell asleep, his arm encircling her, fingers resting against her gently rounded belly.


	9. Chapter 8: Unexpected

Author's note: Because I don't want to come up with five to six months worth of interesting medical cases (I'm really not that creative), chapters going forward will touch on spoilers from the second half of House Season 5. This chapter includes explicit medical spoilers for _Painless._

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There had always been unspoken limits to their intimacy. So, when Lisa Cuddy woke up and found House's arm draped over her, felt his breath stirring the hairs at the back of her neck, she was stunned. She had never imagined House cuddling anyone, even--or maybe especially--her.

It was both so comfortable yet so strange that she laid there motionless for several minutes, unwilling to do anything that might bring this to an end. Last night had gone better than she could have possibly hoped. House hadn't thrown her out, to begin with. He'd actually expressed some form of opinion that didn't seem calculated to cause the most extreme uproar or cause the most targeted heartbreak. And then, afterward . . .

Well, they'd reached the afterward without either of them storming out or hurling insults at one another. And the afterward had been what she hadn't even dared to fantasize about.

But this was something else altogether.

She lay still, not wanting to wake him and end the moment. Unwilling to do anything that might wake House up and cause him to realize what he'd done while asleep.

But the demands of her overfull bladder and grumbling stomach quickly became too much to ignore, so she slipped carefully out from under his arm. He grumbled in his sleep, his hand feeling about for the lost warmth, before sighing and rolling back over to his side of the bed. She ignored the realization that they'd gotten to the point of having his and her sides of the bed before even figuring out what the hell to call their relationship, and headed off to the bathroom.

Once she'd finished up her business in there, she walked quietly down the hallway and around into his kitchen. With her stomach demanding something, anything, she pulled open the fridge and hoped that she'd find something, but expecting that he'd fallen out of the habit of keeping decent breakfast food around over the couple of weeks. So when she found the unexpired milk, fresh eggs, even decent-looking veggies that hadn't started to melt into puddles of organic goop, she again found herself stunned.

Apparently, he hadn't fallen out of the habit of purchasing breakfast food only she consumed.

She glanced at the clock and realized it was early yet, just before seven o'clock. She had time before she needed to leave to make it back to her house to change and still be at the hospital by nine.

A few minutes of quiet rummaging through his cabinets produced a properly sized pan, another few minutes of rummaging produced a bowl and wisk. Green pepper and onion, check. Eggs and milk, butter. Within ten minutes, she had a fair example of an omelette sizzling away in the pan, and enough odor of cooking egg and onion in the air that it should draw anyone out of bed.

After she slid the first omelette onto a plate, she turned and found him leaning against the side of the kitchen door, staring at her. The hair on one side of his head was standing up on end, his eyes were still hazy with sleep, and he was only wearing a rumpled pair of boxers. She suspected that she didn't look much different, standing in the middle of his kitchen in long black t-shirt, her hair hastily pulled back into a snarled ponytail. But she decided the rumpled look was definitely a good look for him.

"Good morning, sunshine" she chirped at him, and passed him the plate. He took the plate and blinked at it for a moment. "It's food," she stated.

"I know," he responded. "It's also seven o'clock in the morning."

"Many normal people are awake and functional at this time of morning." She turned back to the stove and started making a second omelette.

"They aren't normal," he grumped, but he placed the plate on the table and opened another drawer behind her to pull out silverware.

When she brought the second plate over to the table, she discovered that he'd set out two place settings, and poured two glasses of milk. She hadn't seen any juice in her rummaging, or for that matter, any coffee or a way to make coffee, so she figured that the milk was probably the only option.

Sitting across from one another, they both focused on eating their breakfast for a few minutes. She could see him shaking off the last vestiges of sleep as he ate, so she simply sat there, enjoyed her breakfast, enjoyed the silence.

"Getting pretty at home here," he grunted.

She shrugged, but studied him closely. Usually, she was a fair judge of House's actual moods, not the moods indicated by his words, and she believed that he was relaxed, more commenting on the obvious than making any judgment or expressing any discomfort. "I was hungry. Bodies demand food."

"Especially pregnant bodies."

"Yes."

"I didn't know you could cook."

"I have a lot of hidden talents, House."

"Well, I know about some of them," he smirked, and she blushed slightly.

But then the humor vanished, and she could see him weighing what to say next. "What do you want to do about all this?" he asked, gesturing vaguely.

What she knew was that right now she didn't want it to change from what it was and had been. Somehow, this private relationship provided her with a focus, a focus she knew she'd been missing over the past few weeks as her staff had kept them apart; as she'd refused to acknowledge to herself that she'd come to depend on more than just his presence as the bastard employee in her life. But she knew she couldn't say that to House. Hell, she didn't even know how to verbalize those vague longings and desires to anyone. She wasn't any better at speaking about her emotions than he was about his.

"Maybe I've got you where I want you."

"What, by the balls?" Then he stilled, and she saw something she'd seen so clearly only a few times before. House turned inward for a moment, triggered into focusing completely on some idea, some connection. Then, he mumbled "oh crap," jumped up from the table, headed straight over to where his cell phone sat on the coffee table in the living room.

He hit an number, and as soon as it stopped ringing, started talking.

"Cancel the surgery."

"Yes, damnit, cancel that surgery."

"I'll tell you when I get in."

"I know it's only seven o'clock . . . "

He shut the phone.

The intensity faded out of him, and he turned back to her. "Cuddy . . ." he began.

She knew the previous conversation was over for the moment, and felt both relief and sadness. "So, your patient isn't undergoing major brain surgery today?"

"Probably not."

"What do you intend to subject him to instead?"

"Seizure control medication."

Well, that at least was something far less controversial than attempting to surgically disable parts of his brain. "Seizure control for pain?"

"The seizures are originating in his brain stem and manifesting as pain."

"Interesting theory. Sometime, you'll have to explain to me how you got from our conversation to that conclusion."

"Balls," he muttered, offering no further clarity. "I have to go."

"Go, go," she waved her hand at him, knowing that once he had a theory between his teeth, it was best not to stand in the way between the theory and the evidence. "I can quickly clean up here, and I have to leave soon anyhow. There would be definite gossip if I showed up in the same outfit today as yesterday."

He nodded, and limped off in the direction of his bathroom. A short time later, as she gathered their plates off the table and quickly washed them and the pan in the sink, she heard the rush of the shower starting. Her traitorous mind presented her with a detailed imagining of House naked in the shower, and she suppressed a brief temptation to go join him. That was something best saved for some other morning, and she suspected that there just might be those other mornings.

She retrieved yesterday's outfit from the floor of his bedroom, and began to get dressed. It was starting to get late, starting to get to the point where she chanced being later than usual to work after her visit home. She briefly cursed her stupid unwillingness to bring a change of outfit even on those nights when she knew she fully intended to stay the night. But, in the past, the idea of doing something so obvious had scared her, and probably would have terrified House.

Her fingers slipped as she tried to attach the hook and eye on her skirt, and she glanced down at it. The two halves had a good quarter-inch distance between them, a quarter-inch distance that seemed totally unwilling to close. Rather than yet purchase maternity clothing, she'd still been depending on the clothes stuffed at the back of her closet, clothes from times in the past when she'd gone up a size or so due to stress, busyness, what-have-you. It didn't look like even those were going to be an option fairly soon.

For today at least, she hoped she could find some more forgiving clothing at home. Maybe it was time to go shopping. Not that she actually knew where to go shopping for maternity clothing--even in all her past attempts, she'd never gotten to the point where she'd thought about that specific aspect. And still, on some level, she'd been denying the reality enough to delay herself.

She looked at the clock and cursed to herself, then buttoned her jacket over her skirt. Nobody much was going to see her in the walk from House's front door to her car, or from her car into her own house. The skirt should stay decent, she hoped. And she should be able to find something in her closet at home to do for the day.


	10. Chapter 9: Confrontation

Author's note: apologies for how long it's been since I updated. The past few months have been hell. I have a few more chapters that I'll be editing and posting as a get around it them in the next couple of days or weeks.

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Cuddy walked into the hospital at five minutes after nine, her calm exterior not betraying the rush that had gotten her into the hospital at a time so close to normal.

Traffic between House's condo and her house, her desperate search for clothing that still fit comfortably, traffic between her house and the hospital--everything had conspired against her this morning. While she'd been feeling awake and even happy when she left House's place, she currently felt tired, and generally pissed off. But nobody here needed to see that that side of her. There were few people at the hospital she trusted that much.

She stopped at the front desk, where the nurse on duty gave her a grin, a pile of inter-campus mail, and a stack of files. She glanced at the mess, and stacked it up, deciding to take it to her desk to organize. As she juggled the mass of paper and her briefcase, walking quickly into her office, she almost missed the person lurking by the door of her office. Until he followed her through, and she glanced back, sighing and nodding at him to follow her in.

"So, I stopped by your house last night . . . " he began, talking to her back.

Cuddy looked back at Wilson in shock, dumped the papers and briefcase into a disordered pile on her desk, then turned to face him, her hands on her hips. "You stopped by my house?"

"You weren't answering your cell phone."

"And that was any business of yours?" Right now, she didn't care that she'd been half-hoping to confide the truth in him. Right now, she was just pissed at his audacity.

Wilson gave her his pleading puppy dog look, but she wasn't in the mood to allow it to soften her reaction today. "I was worried."

"I'm a grown-up. I think I can handle myself."

"You weren't home at eleven o'clock."

"No, I wasn't home at eleven o'clock last night." After this, she also wasn't inclined to satisfy his curiosity about where she had been. Let House tell him if he so desired.

"Where were you?" Wilson tried to hide the whining underneath a tone of soft worry, but she knew him and his moods too well.

"Once again, and that is any business of yours?"

"We're friends; I'm concerned."

"You're hovering." As she reflected on it, she realized he'd been hovering for weeks now. Hovering too much; in fact being one of the people who had been graciously and infuriatingly interfering with her attempts to do her job.

"I'm hovering because I'm worried."

She suppressed her desire to knock his look of earnest concern off his face. "I'm not one of your projects. I don't want to be one of your projects." She thought that she had at least kept the edge of angry and nastiness out of her voice.

"Oh, come on. You tell me that you're pregnant via some unknown one-night stand, and you don't expect me to be concerned?"

So, he was annoyed enough to toss a couple hits under the belt. She should have known that damned lie would come back to haunt her. "I expect you to be supportive, but not be dropping by my house unannounced at eleven o'clock in the evening."

"Why were you out that late on a weeknight, anyhow?"

She threw up her hands and turned away from him. "I was boozing it up at the bars, and I went home with some random guy who has a fetish for pregnant women."

"Cuddy!"

"Leave. Leave NOW." She turned back, put her hands flat against Wilson's chest, and pushed him in the general direction of the door. She needed him gone before her stress and hormone fueled rage turned her into a raging bitch and made her say things they'd both regret.

"Cuddy . . . "

"And don't come back until you've figured out how to be supportive without stalking."

Wilson pulled back from her and stomped out, pulling her office door shut a little harder than necessary behind him. Cuddy collapsed onto her office couch, trying to bring her temper back under control. She knew that it was partly her fault that Wilson had gotten to this point: she had allowed him to start babying and protecting her these past few weeks. She had allowed him to think that she was accepting that smothering, accommodating paternalism that all his girlfriends began by welcoming, and ended up desperately attempting to escape.

Cuddy had to wonder what it said about her that she could only take a few weeks of that attitude. Or maybe, what it said about the types of women he usually dated that they seemed to be able to take months or years of it.

An odd fluttering sensation caused her to look down at her growing stomach in surprise, and register again the uncoordinated mess of an outfit she'd managed to pull together this morning. A drawstring madras skirt, made a bit more formal by a ruffled pink blouse and gray jacket. Once again, she wondered exactly how she'd managed to seemingly outgrow all the options in her closet in about two day's time, and that she desperately needed to add a shopping trip onto her ever-long to-do list. Preferably before the scheduled board meeting on Friday.

The thought of the board meeting made her look back at the piles of paperwork that covered her desk, piles she'd only been able to organize over the past few days but not keep moving through in her standard fashion. The economic downturn was wreaking havoc on the hospital's finances, as even consistent donors of years past curtailed or stopped their regular donations, and new donor pickings were few and far between. The board, already having expressed a vague unhappiness with the idea that she'd be taking her twelve weeks of family leave about five months from now, was going to be even less happy about the current financial reports she had to provide them. Hospital expenses so far this year had already far exceeded their budget, and hospital income had been much lower than predicted.

Her anger at Wilson faded away as the familiar worry settled back upon her shoulders. She had spent most of the past few weeks tracking down donors, calling, wining and dining them, freed of her usually intensive oversight of her hospital. That was why she hadn't objected to Wilson's hovering up until this point . . . it had given her much-needed break to focus on the part of her job that was slowly but surely falling to pieces. Unfortunately, even weeks of focus on the public relations and development aspects hadn't offered much in the way of results. Donors of long-standing, people she even now considered some type of friends, had listened to her needs and requests, and had in return told her of their misfortunes in the markets these past few months. Others had simply refused to return her phone calls, leaving her to wonder what type of follow-up might seem just desperate enough, without being too desperate.

The fund-raising part of her job, never all that pleasant or that simple, had become like squeezing blood from a stone.

She was in no mood to spend the morning sitting at her desk, engaging in another round of fruitless phone calls or trying once more to find those non-existent places in the hospital budget where cuts could be made without impacting patient care or hospital employees. The numbers in the reports for this Friday weren't going to magically change if she stared at them longer or tried manually calculating them to prove their financial software wrong. She needed to get out of her office and actually do something involved in running her hospital.

And she needed to shop.

She headed out of her office, over to the front desk. The employee there often doubled as her assistant, kept general track of her calendar and other such tasks. "I'm going to be gone for a couple of hours this afternoon, running some necessary errands," she said, and the woman nodded her head quickly and entered a note into her computer.

Then Cuddy headed over to the elevator. After the past couple weeks of neglect, she really needed to do her own rounds of the hospital itself, to check out how all the departments seemed to be functioning, to put the fear of Dr. Cuddy back into some of those people who might have seen her distraction of the past few weeks as an excuse to slack. And where better to start than with House's team?


	11. Chapter 10

Just a few minutes later, Cuddy was reconsidering her decision.

Both the conference area and House's office were a flood of charts and papers; various referral forms and test results. When she arrived, Foreman and Hadley had both been looking at a file, discussing it in soft voices. The small but neatly arranged piles on the table in front of them revealed that this wasn't the first file they'd looked at this morning, but those piles were dwarfed by the number of other files elsewhere.

"What is this?" she asked, directing her question straight at Foreman.

"Referrals," he stated, his face tight. "Apparently everyone in the world needs House's opinion on their patient, and they are just coming by to dump the files on us."

"Referrals to House and his team should come through me or Dr. Cameron."

He gestured at the files around him. "Feel free to inform the rest of the doctors in this hospital of that."

"Where are Kutner and Taub?"

"Taub is with House, and Kutner is in the clinic."

Cuddy made a fast decision. "Get Kutner back up here, have him bring some interns too. These files are immediately going back to whomever sent them, my orders. If the original doctors really want House's opinion on them, they have to be reviewed by me or Cameron first."

She thought again for a moment. "Also, I need a list of which doctors have sent you files, how many each sent, and the general seriousness of the case. Anyone who participated in this dump better not actually be waiting on House's diagnosis."

Hadley picked up one of the small piles of files from the table. "We've been trying to keep some form of control over this, Dr. Cuddy," she said, her remark apparently including both herself and Foreman. "These are the cases we're most concerned need some form of urgent follow-up, although I am not sure how many of them require House's type of expertise."

That pile seemed to contain about the average number of complicated or curious cases referred to House's department in a month. She usually tried to pass on four or five of those. "I'll review those right now then, and decide if you should keep them. The rest of this mess though, is going to be dealt with this morning."

Cuddy walked into House's office, pushed aside the files piled on his desk, and sat down to review the cases Dr. Hadley had given to her. By the time she'd gotten through the second file, Kutner and a few unrecognizable others had shown up with filing boxes, and the the files were getting sorted, quickly reviewed, and tossed into boxes labeled with specific doctor's names. One of the interns had set up some sort of note-taking system, and was jotting down information about each file.

The piles around the conference room had decreased in size dramatically, one of the interns had started sorting through the files in House's office, and Cuddy was on the seventh and last file when she looked up to find a shocked House standing in his office door. Sure, he'd never display an emotion such as shock in a way that others might recognize it, but she could see it. His shock was apparent in his momentary pause, in his inability to immediately come up with a biting or inappropriate comment.

"Have you been demoted?" he queried weakly. "You appear to be sitting at my desk."

"I'm borrowing it, to do the work you've apparently chosen not to do."

"I'm not diagnosing a hangnail for an idiot who's willing to let his patient suffer in order to annoy me."

"There are some valid cases in here."

"So, the idiots are screwing over both their patients, and the patients of other doctors. See this hospital's wonderful demonstration of fellowship."

"House, why did you let it get to this point?"

"Why not?"

His apparently casual indifference almost made her stand up, curse him out, and storm out. But she saw the slightest look of embarrassment cross his face, recalled that she'd been avoiding him as much as he'd been avoiding her for the past several weeks. This had obviously been a coordinated effort by several of the doctors in the hospital who strongly disliked House, and it was her responsibility to identify and keep such bullying efforts under control.

"You will be taking one of these cases," she said, gesturing at the files she had already reviewed and sorted on his desk.

"We have a case," he reminded her.

"I thought you'd found a solution," she shot back, and then grimaced as Foreman gave her an odd look. She'd forgotten about the situation they'd left that case in last night, with the surgery in limbo due to her refusal to permit it to occur; and the fact that she wasn't supposed to know yet that House had chosen to have the surgery canceled.

Foreman interjected, "We canceled the surgery, which you hadn't approved, on House's orders."

House glanced at his fellows. "Taub is currently monitoring the patient after his first dose of an antiepileptic."

"An antiepileptic?" Foreman challenged, looking at Cuddy for her reaction. "He's suffering from unrelenting pain, he hasn't had a seizure . . ."

"He's suffering from seizures deep in his brain stem, which are causing his primitive brain to create pain."

Cuddy nodded, the explanation making as much sense to her now as it had earlier in the morning. At least the treatment itself was nowhere near as dangerous as some others House had proposed for various patients. And at least it was a more reasonable explanation than the patient's brain simply creating the pain with no cause or reason of origin.

Foreman looked like he might want to continue to challenge the explanation, but with Cuddy and House seemingly in agreement--or at least not in disagreement--he remained silent. He'd been the one who had come to Cuddy yesterday about the proposed brain surgery; while he'd actually agreed with House about its possible success, he wasn't willing to perform such a risky surgery without dotting all his is and crossing all his ts. For him, that included making sure the dean of the hospital agreed as well.

"Finish sorting and get rid of those files," she ordered the group in the next room, and then looked at the intern who had been working on the couch in House's office. "You, back there with them, take the files you're working with."

She closed the door behind him, and then turned to House. "And you, don't let something like this in my hospital go on for this long."

Once again, he looked vaguely embarrassed, and he remained silent. She sighed. "House, you're a valuable asset to this hospital, and other doctors here were apparently taking advantage of my distraction over the past few weeks to harass you. That's not something I am willing to put up with, but I have to know about it to stop it."

"Maybe I was planning my own revenge."

"We're not in grammar school anymore."

"Yeah, you don't look much like a pregnant seventh grader."

"Leave it alone," she sighed.

He suddenly focused on her face, then looked her over quickly, and she almost blushed at the scrutiny.

"Cuddy, are you okay?"

Those were words she never really expected to hear come out of House's mouth. "I'm fine, House."

"No . . . this morning, you didn't look like death warmed over. Now you do."

"Thanks for the compliment."

He stepped closer to her, moving into her personal space. She'd had years to get used to his regular violations of her personal space, years to learn to suppress her body's varying reactions to it, but right at this moment she wished that she dared react. Dared to lean forward and rest her forehead against his chest with his arms around her, to take a moment, forget about the hospital, forget about Wilson, and just relax.

But the blinds of his office were open, and she didn't know that he was even capable of understanding or providing her with the moment of comfort she desired. So she simply stood still and took a few deep breaths, taking in his scent and allowing herself to feel his closeness.

"You know . . ." he stammered. "I . . . if . . ."

"Don't worry yourself with it, House," she said. She smiled slightly and moved back away from him. "Just deal with your patient, get these damned files cleaned up, and find yourself another case, okay?"

He didn't agree, but he didn't disagree either. Since that was better than she usually got, she decided to regard it as a good end, and turned to leave his office.

"See you later?" he offered.

"Later," she agreed, wondering at how she could find so much to anticipate in that simple phrase.


	12. Chapter 11: Truth and Lies

_Author's note_: once again, I apologize for how long it's been since my last update. I'm still buried under a massive real-life project that is taking most of my energy and creativity, and it doesn't appear it's going to be over anytime soon. I have this, and three-fourths of the next chapter which I hope to complete in the next week or so.

I am also aware this chapter is slightly shorter than the average size I've been posted. Originally, I had intended to post this and the next chapter as one chapter, but the next chapter just keeps growing . . .

* * *

"Well, she's apparently pissed at me now."

House glanced up in surprise as Wilson threw himself down into the cafeteria chair across from him. But after taking in the scene in front of him, he didn't allow his confusion to stop him from quickly snagging the bag of chips off the tray that Wilson also shoved onto the table.

The plastic bottle of pop on the tray flopped over and rolled, bouncing right over the raised edge of the tray, falling with a muffled thud onto the floor. "God damn it." Wilson muttered, and leaned over to grab the pop. When he straightened back up, he didn't even seem to notice his bag of chips had transferred itself from the tray to House's hand.

"Who, your latest screw?"

Wilson groaned and responded, "Cuddy."

"How'd you piss off the queen bee this time?"

"I was just trying to be supportive . . . "

"Your supportive is regarded as smothering by most sane women."

"So I've been informed." Wilson pounded his fist into the table. "This is all your fault, you know."

House froze, the bag of chips half-torn open. Had she finally broken down and told Wilson something? No, if she'd told him that the two of them were sleeping together, Wilson would be pissing all over himself with glee. Not so deep in angered self-pity that he was slamming around lunch trays and chairs.

"It could have been you, you fool." Wilson continued, "and even if you two were now at the point of mud-slinging, slap-fights across the halls of Princeton-Plainsboro, I think it would have been a better idea."

"What?"

"If you hadn't wimped out, and you know, maybe asked her out last fall like a normal man who liked a normal woman, perhaps she'd be dating you rather than pregnant with the offspring of some one-night stand."

"Or maybe, the whole hospital would now be a smoking hole as a result of the inevitable nuclear explosion," House launched back, while another part of his brain stored the interesting piece of information Wilson had just provided.

"You know what? I'm not talking about Cuddy with you." Wilson shot back, abruptly standing back up. "As far as I can tell, you don't even care."

"What exactly am I supposed to care about?"

"That a woman that you sometimes pretend to care about is pregnant and alone?"

"That is a state she's been trying desperately to achieve for several years."

"It doesn't mean that the reality is going to be all she expected it to be."

"Or maybe it is." Obviously, Cuddy had not shared anything about the reality of her--or their--current situation with Wilson, despite his hovering attendance on her the past few weeks.

"Why was I stupid enough to think that maybe I'd find some sympathy here?"

"Sympathy for your patronizing attitude that apparently even Cuddy has decided she finds unbearable?"

"Screw you, House." Wilson stormed off, leaving lunch and tray behind.

House looked after Wilson for a moment, then shrugged and pulled the tray over to his side of the table. He'd seen Wilson through these episodes of self-pity before, and knew not to take the outbursts too seriously. In very short order, Wilson would be back to his overly pleasing self, figuring out some way to remain friends with Cuddy while not quite going to whatever extremes that had finally forced her to kick his ass.

But that piece of information that Wilson had revealed in the conversation both interested and disturbed him. Sure, he was aware that given their not-quite-relationship over the past few weeks, Cuddy hadn't exactly been going around telling people who the father of her child was. But the Cuddy he knew didn't generally lie either. She always wanted to leave open the possibility of eventually revealing the truth, without having to take back words she'd already spoken. If she'd actually lied to Wilson, she'd not been expecting to ever reveal the truth.

That realization once again took him back to some dark thoughts. That he knew he couldn't promise not to disappoint her. That no matter what she said, she knew that he couldn't promise not to disappoint her.

Why would she even want to offer him what she'd offered last night? The chance to be the kid's father, to whatever degree he wanted to be a father? It wasn't like he had any qualifications for fatherhood.

Fucked up relationship with the guy who pretended to be his father, check. Fucked up relationship with a lying mother, check. Complete inability to understand or relate to normal children, check. He was the prime example of a man who hit everything on the checklist of 'person to keep your children far away from.'

But she'd come back. She'd offered. Like when he'd become the prime example of the doctor who couldn't get hired at a blood bank, she'd offered him a position that nobody besides her believed that he could fulfill and succeed at.

Years later, he was still here, proving to her every day that he could be something that only she believed he could be. He had to admit, that counted for something. Maybe just that no matter who and what else he had failed in his life, he somehow couldn't let himself fail her. And maybe, even though she often acted like she doubted it, she understood that.


	13. Chapter 12: A Bit More Real

After an hour of shopping, Cuddy looked at her pitiful collection of shopping bags and sighed. Although she'd never been one to shy away from some discomfort in the name of style, most of the the maternity clothing she'd found had been too ugly, too uncomfortable, or completely inappropriate.

She had no intention of spending the next few months wearing polyester maternity suits that looked like they had been in stock since the 1980s. Nor did she intend to embrace the pastel-colored ruffled skirts and flowery tops that wouldn't have looked out of place on a barefoot, pregnant flowerchild of the 1960s. She had located a couple of peasant-top dresses in subtle browns and dark grays, and some fairly plain wool maternity skirts and pants, but nothing in the more intense, bright colors she generally preferred. Her wardrobe was going to be quite drab over the next few months.

Exiting the last maternity clothing store the shopping area offered, she stepped out into the wind. The day had unexpectedly turned quite blustery and cool, with high gray clouds racing across the darkening sky. It was going to be a long and chilly walk back to the parking garage.

About half-way through the walk back, just as she strongly began to regret her lack of winter jacket, gloves, and hat, another store caught her eye. The glassy eyes of fluffy blue and pink bears stared out at the sidewalk, their numbers almost overwhelming the crib and changing table setup in the small window display.

She knew that she didn't need anything, not right now at least. In the days after she'd been approved to adopt, the hours she thought that she'd become mother to Joy, she'd spent a small fortune on a neutral-colored nursery setup. She had never found the time or energy to return or store all the nursery equipment after the adoption had fallen through, so it all waited behind a closed door in her house.

But she was cold, and a blue bear wearing a baseball cap and holding a bat caught her eye. She didn't have anything blue for the nursery, just items in green, yellow, and a few pink things she'd received from over-achievers at the hospital before Joy's adoption had fallen apart. She also knew that she'd be overwhelmed with boy's toys, boy's clothing--piles of gifts in blue--as her due date grew nearer. But the bear stared out of the window with a slightly lost and quizzical look that didn't quite match the expression of the other bears in the display.

A bell on the door jingled as she pushed it open, and a sales woman headed over to intercept her, sizing her up with an experienced glance. Her eye coasted across the multiple bags advertising maternity clothing, across Cuddy's current attire, and her face lit up as she probably placed her into the mental box labeled "expectant mother, willing to shop."

"Hello, welcome. Is there anything I can help you find today?"

"Just browsing . . ." Cuddy responded, taking a quick look around to see if she could quickly spot the baseball bear from the window on a shelf. But the store was over-crowded, a baby boutique stuffing itself into a small storefront in a high-rent location, and the bear not on display anywhere easy to spot.

"Please, make yourself at home. If you don't find what you're looking for, we also have an extensive special order catalog."

Cuddy nodded, and headed off into the section of the shelves overloaded with various toys. She soon located the bin of various bears, pink and blue, some holding items, some not. But baseball bear was nowhere to be found.

The sales woman had kept an eye on her. After Cuddy had dug unsuccessfully through the bin of bears for a minute or so, she drifted over. "Looking for something in particular?"

"There's a bear in the window, holding a baseball bat . . ."

The woman's face fell a bit. "I'm sorry, we're currently sold out of that bear. We're expecting another shipment next Tuesday." Then she continued, "we have plush baseball bats and some other toys, some baseball-themed nursery bedding . . ."

Cuddy shook her head. "I was only interested in the bear."

"So, a little boy?"

She knew that the woman was only trying to salvage a sale, but she couldn't stop herself from smiling slightly and responding "Yes."

"Your first?"

"Yes."

"Lots of things you need to purchase. Are you sure you're not interested in looking at anything else?"

She shook her head again, and said "I have most of what I need . . ."

The woman laughed. "I thought that, then I brought my daughter home."

That off-hand comment suddenly brought back the pain she had felt when Joy's adoption had fallen apart. She'd never gotten a chance to bring Joy home, to show the infant the nursery she'd put together for her. And even though she knew that Joy was safe, was loved in the home of her mother, it was a loss she still grieved on some level. The daughter she'd so briefly thought she'd have, the daughter she didn't have. Even though the idea of the son she had coming softened the sorrow of the memory a bit, it did not fully ease it.

Apparently, some remnant of that old pain also crossed her face. The sales woman turned instantly apologetic. "Is there something wrong? I'm sorry . . ."

"Nothing, it's fine." And suddenly she felt the urge to buy something that was going to be for this baby alone, something that didn't have the history that all the other baby items she owned already had. Something for a little boy. "Why don't you show me that baseball bedding?"

The woman immediately entered into full sales mode and drew her across the store. "It's right over here. And if you or the father are a fan of a particular team, we can special-order items for any sports team."

The father? It was moments like this when she realized that despite what she knew about House, she still knew so little. She couldn't make a guess as to what his favorite baseball team was; in fact, she had no idea if he even liked baseball. She recalled he had been a lacrosse fan in college, but that wasn't a sport most people continued following after graduation.

The sales woman offered Cuddy the baseball-themed bedding. Cuddy glanced at it and quickly shook her head. It looked like the standard infant bedding found in hundreds of nurserys--bright blue and red, generic baseball themes. She continued walking down the racks of displayed bedding, away from the sales woman. Cars, trains, boats and dinosaurs, all the standard boy themes, none of which spoke to her in any way.

She had almost reached the end of the section dedicated to boy's bedding when she spotted it. The bedding itself was not on full display, unlike many of the classics she'd already decided to ignore, so she almost missed it.

It was light blue and dark brown, the guitars, drum set, and keyboard lovingly detailed. She pulled the package off the shelf before the woman hurried over to help her, studying the picture on the package in detail.

"Umm, Rock-and-Roll Baby?" the woman offered, her eyes once again skittering across Cuddy, but this time in disbelief. "It's not among our most popular sets . . ."

"Can I take a closer look?"

The woman nodded, and she unzipped the plastic top of the package, pulling out the quilt. Full-size, it looked even nicer--beautifully designed and detailed. This was obviously not an inexpensive set of bedding, but she really didn't care.

She knew not to too closely question what was driving her decision here. The bedding--it reminded her of House. It looked like something he'd both torment her about yet secretly appreciate. Why she would want to buy something that might meet his approval . . . again, that was a question she decided to refuse to consider for the moment.

"We have matching wall hangings . . ." the woman offered, gesturing at the shelf beneath.

The two brown patchwork guitars sealed her decision. "I'll take the bedding and the wall hangings," she stated, folding the quilt back up.

The woman once again gave her an incredulous look, but shrugged and apparently decided to accept that it was a wonderful sale on a slow afternoon. Cuddy handed over her credit card after the woman rang it up, noting that it was almost twice the price of the baseball set the woman had shown her previously.

But she once again looked at the bedding set, and pictured it decorating the crib and walls of the room she had set up as a nursery. The colors were the right shades to coordinate with the neutral colors of the room, and didn't obnoxiously scream "boy!"

Her thoughts wandered to the image of a small baby sleeping surrounded by the set and decorations, and her lips curved in a smile. She had to admit she still had some of that younger, hard-partying Lisa Cuddy buried deep inside her; she couldn't entirely blame some odd need to seek approval from House for her attraction to this bedding set either. He probably would appreciate it, but it spoke to her too.

But when her overly active imagination suddenly provided the image of her nursery, decorated with the rock-and-roll theme, and House dozing in the rocking chair with an infant asleep on his chest, she hastily shut herself down and returned back to reality. She still had a walk back to the parking garage, through the increasingly cold and windy early evening, and now she had a large bag of baby bedding and nursery decoration to add to the collection of bags she was already carrying. Not the smartest decision she'd ever made, purchasing something so large and bulky. For a moment, she considered asking the woman if they could arrange to ship the package to her house, but the thought of waiting for it to arrive upset her. She wanted to take it home today, to bring the first thing she'd purchased for her son home with her.

She nodded as the woman wished her good night, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.


	14. Chapter 13: Not Too Far Away

**Author's note**: it appears that Wilson is no longer a member of the hospital board, and perhaps I have been mistaken in remembering that he was (or have forgotten the reason he no longer is). My story, my version of the universe, my rules. Wilson is a member of the board.

* * *

Lisa Cuddy sighed with relief as she walked through her front door, into the darkness of her own front hall, her own living room. She switched on the living room lamp, tossed her gray wool coat over the arm of the side chair, and collapsed onto the couch. After a moment of silent debate, she kicked off her shoes under the coffee table, then rested her feet on top.

That nagging voice of neatness--hang up your coat! take off your stockings before they snag!--her mother had installed in her mind grumbled at her, but she simply ignored it. The board meeting had run until late in the evening, each board member feeling the need to expound long and loudly on the financial troubles the hospital currently faced. And each had offered extensive opinions on the ideas the others had for solving those problems.

Well, most members had expressed their opinions. Wilson, the person she could usually count on to be the humorous voice of reason, bringing order back to the discussion and diffusing situations between those who seemed to disagree for the sake of disagreement, had sulked in his chair and said almost nothing over the course of the six-hour meeting. In fact, he had intentionally ignored her first attempt to close the session at the four-hour mark, obviously refusing to look in her direction as he did not second her suggestion. It had taken another two hours of mainly useless but exhausting discussion for another board member to be willing to bring the meeting to a close and schedule its continuation for another evening.

She rubbed her forehead and considered the distance between the couch and the kitchen. She knew that she should eat--her headache was probably at least partly due to low blood sugar. But she couldn't find the energy to get up from the couch and over to the kitchen to stick something into the microwave.

A dull thump sounded from the general direction of her front door. She looked over toward the door, wondering what it had been. It hadn't sounded like a knock--maybe ice falling off the porch roof?

The second thump, a bit harder and sharper, convinced her that it was intentional. Who would be coming to pester her now? If it was Wilson, coming to lecture or rant, he'd find less than a warm welcome.

The annoyance propelled her off the couch and over to open the door, where she was confronted with two large white bags resting on top of an arm, and a cane swinging forward to thump her door again. It clattered against the internal frame, and House's face peered out around one side of the bags.

"So you are home," he said. "Got food, want some?"

The aroma of garlic and tomato drifting from the bags in his arms certainly smelled better than anything she'd be able to dig out of her fridge or freezer.

"Sure," she answered, relieving him of the bags and gesturing him in.

He worked his way over to the couch, and she deposited the bags onto the coffee table. She considered running into the kitchen and getting plates and silverware, but House saw her looking toward the kitchen and said, "Everything we need is in the bags." Right at the moment, she didn't care about eating with plasticware out of styrofoam, if he didn't.

She could feel him watching her as she pulled out the containers, each labeled with its contents. Garlic cheese bread, fettuccine alfredo, angel hair with marinara sauce, chicken piccata . . . "This one yours? " she asked, passing it over to him.

"Sure looks like it," he said, accepting the container. "I recommend you start with the garlic bread. I've been told it's to die for."

"Or, it'll eventually kill you."

"After making lots of money for the hospital via stents and bypass operations."

She opened a container and stared at the thick cut french bread, the melted cheese toasted golden, the selection of dipping sauces, and shrugged. Definitely better than anything she could find in her fridge at the moment.

Half an hour later, all his food was gone, most of her food was gone, and she'd somehow told every detail of the terrible board meeting to House. He leaned forward and snagged a remaining bit of the fettuccine out of her container, considered it for a moment, and frowned. "I didn't know the hospital finances were that badly off."

"Sandberg tried to lay at least part of the blame at your department's door."

"Easier for an idiot to blame something he thinks he has control over, than something that controls him."

"Exactly." She felt a hint of worry cross her mind. "You're not going to do anything about that, are you?".

"To Sandberg? He's not worth the effect. He's yours to deal with."

"Thanks," she returned, rolling her eyes.

"Now Wilson, on the other hand . . ."

"House ..."

"He needs to pull his head out of his ass."

Well, she couldn't disagree with that statement. But the harsh edge she heard on that statement, that indicated something else. "House, did something happen between you and Wilson?"

"Nothing more than his nasty gossip girl side speaking out. He gets that way when he knows he's in the wrong."

"What did he say?"

"Something about you, anonymous one-night stands in bars . . ."

House had ever so slightly turned away from her as he spoke his last sentence, and her heart dropped. At least she could read this plain as day from him--he didn't quite know how to react, so he was waiting her her to provide a foundation on which to react.

"Let's call it a series of one-night stands. Which didn't involve bars."

He choked on the piece of pasta in response. After he'd managed to cough his throat clear, he gasped out "You lied to him."

"I didn't lie, he assumed. And you know what assume stands for."

"You didn't correct him."

"Because he was being an ass."

"And because you weren't sure you wanted anyone to know?"

She hesitated a moment, but knew that she had to be honest here. House was a trickster himself, but one thing that tricksters knew the value of was honesty. "Exactly. Before the other evening . . . well, I didn't know where this all would end up. If you didn't want to be involved, did you want Wilson harassing you to be involved?"

"So you're saying you're willing to have one of us tell him?"

"After he pulls his head out of his ass. Let's make it a reward."

"Works for me." House grinned at her. "That may take a while though, judging by his attitude recently."

"I'm not sure I'd be too upset if it took the entire remainder of this pregnancy . . ."

House choked back another burst of laughter, then started poking around her side table. "So, you got a remote around here?"

Remaining on the couch for a while, brainlessly watching television, sounded like a good way to complete the evening. "It's in the drawer."

He found it, and settled back, then turned on her television. "So, what channel do you think has the monster trucks?"

* * *

A few hours later, she woke with an odd kink in her neck. She opened her eyes, found herself looking sideways at some infomercial for some product that a bleached blond with surgically-enhanced breasts was breathlessly hawking, with a bizarre snorting sound coming from above. She turned her head to look upwards and discovered that her head was in House's lap, her legs covered with one of her throw blankets; and that House had his head thrown back against her couch, was sound asleep and snoring oddly.

"House," she whispered, then increased her volume as the snoring noise continued, "House!"

He jerked awake, and looked down at her in confusion. "You fell asleep," he stated.

"So did you."

"Couldn't move."

"Come on, I suspect my bed would be more comfortable for the both of us."

She got herself to her feet, but House remained seated on her couch. "Your bed?"

"Sleeping upright on the couch can't be too good for that leg of yours."

"It isn't," he admited slowly, and looked at the mess on her coffee table. "You want me to clean up?"

"We can do it in the morning." She guestured with her hands. "I know you know where the bedroom is . . . I bet I can even find a toothbrush for you."

"No sharing?"

She made a face at him. "Ick. Not unless we're desperate."

She walked off toward her bedroom, waiting to see if House followed behind her. As her brain woke up a bit more, his hestitation came into focus. Up until this point, this affair had all been conducted on her terms, and on his territory. Now, she was allowing an alternation in that . . . allowing him into her territory.

She rummaged around in a drawer in her master bathroom for a moment, locating one of the many extra toothbrushes her dentist had provided her with neatly stored away at the back of the drawer, as she waited to see if House had followed her. A few moments later, the dull thud of his cane slowly echoed down the hallway leading to her bedroom, and after a moment, he appeared at the bathroom door.

"See, toothbrush. I told you I had one."

"Thank you," he said quietly.

She nodded, and started brushing her own teeth. He took the new one out of the package, rinsed it, and started brushing his own. When she finished, she went into her room, located one of her warmer pajamas sets, and then dug around in another drawer. She knew he tended to sleep in t-shirt and boxers, and knew that when he was sober, at least, liked to change into a fresh t-shirt before bed.

"I have this . . . " she offered him the shirt she'd found.

"I thought that had found its freedom in the wilderness of the laundry room."

"I borrowed it, hadn't gotten around to returning it yet." She blushed, unwilling to admit anything about the nights when she'd been unwilling to go over to his place, but she'd slept here wearing this shirt.

He gave her one of his looks, shed his pants, and then pulled off his shirt to change.

Even though she was tired, she found herself staring at his chest. It definitely wasn't a bad chest for a man approaching fifty . . .

"I don't have to wear a shirt," he smirked. "And you don't have to wear anything at all."

"It gets a little chilly in here at night. And right now, I need to sleep."

"Spoilsport."

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he raised his hands in surrender. If she hadn't been feeling so tired . . . well, she was tired, he was tired, and it was after midnight. And while tomorrow might be Saturday, she needed to be in the office and at least partly awake at a half-way decent hour. Hospitals never slept.

Feeling his eyes watching her every move, she changed out of her blouse and skirt, hanging them neatly in her closet, and into the pajamas.

They settled down in her bed, each to their own side, and she turned out the light. For a moment, she listened to him breathing on the far side of her bed, then she felt him shift toward her. "'Night, Cuddy," he said.

"'Night, House," she responded, turning toward him as well. She reached out and touched his arm in the dark, then traced her fingers up to the roughness of his cheek. He remained still, and her lips found his lips. She kissed him, felt him kissing her back.

They both settled back down in the mattress, again each to their own side, but closer now. Not quite touching, but not too far away.


	15. Chapter 14: Playing Hooky

The next morning, Cuddy woke to the winter sun shining through her bedroom window, and an otherwise empty bed.

It took a moment for her to realize that if the sun was shining into her bedroom on a winter morning, it was far later than she generally awoke, far later than her alarm clock was programmed to wake her. And it took another moment to recall that she had not gone to bed alone the previous night, since being alone in her bed was the normal state of affairs.

All those facts together proved slightly too much for her still sleep-fogged brain to make sense of. She rolled herself out of bed, did the things she needed to do in the bathroom, and headed toward the living room to see if anything she remembered from the night previous had been reality or particularly vivid dreams.

The sight of House sitting on her couch in his t-shirt and boxers, his feet propped on her clean coffee table, with a bowl of cereal in his hand, at least convinced her that his visit had not been a dream.

"Good morning, sunshine!" he greeted her, giving her a leering once-over.

"My alarm clock appears to have malfunctioned."

"I turned it off. It annoyed me."

Well, that at least answered one question.

"I told the board and the front desk I'd be in at nine this morning . . ."

"It's Saturday. They aren't going to take you at your word. And if they do, they're expecting too much."

Well, they probably would take her at her word, although she had to agree with House that perhaps they had come to expect too much. When was the last time she'd slept in on a Saturday, or woken up in the morning without concern about the hospital finances or administration being at the forefront of her mind?

As her brain continued to slowly wake up, she also realized just how necessary the few extra hours of sleep had been. The exhaustion that had been stalking her all week was no longer eating at the edges of her thoughts, making her feel like she was thinking with a brain wrapped in a few layers of wool. Some of the anger and frustration that yesterday's board meeting had left her with had also faded. It was replaced with a confidence that she could figure out some way to at least triage the situation, not necessarily even keep it from getting worse, but at least find some balance with what the current economic situation was throwing at them.

"You're right," she responded, without specifying exactly how House had been right. "Wasn't quite sure that I'd still find you around . . . "

He shrugged. "You have decent food here," he said, gesturing at the cereal bowl, "a decent TV, and Saturday morning cable programming. I have no place better to be."

"No team members calling you to the hospital?"

"If they called me on Saturday, it better be a case involving something extremely interesting. Like parasites bursting out from under some patient's skin, or flesh melting off of bones, or . . ."

"I get the picture." Cuddy hastily interrupted, bringing an end to his list of suggestions as her empty stomach hinted at a revolt.

She left House to whatever he was watching on her television and headed to her kitchen to find something that her stomach would accept for breakfast. A few minutes later, oatmeal and orange juice in hand, she glanced at the empty table and chairs in her breakfast nook, then headed back to join him on the couch.

He was giving his full attention to the screen, where a pride of lions rested peacefully in the hot sun, ears and tails flicking occasionally, while some overly flat voice-over told some sort of history of the pride. She noted the watermark at the bottom corner of the screen to confirm her suspicions, and commented "Didn't know that you were a PBS fan."

He did a one-shoulder shrug. "It was more interesting a couple of minutes ago . . ."

Not quite wanting to know what more interesting meant, having watched a few public television nature shows in her time, she remained silent.

As she finished up her oatmeal, she looked at House out of the corner of her eye, and realized that his attention was no longer on the television screen. He had turned his head so that he was looking at her, studying her with a slight smile on his face. She leaned forward and placed her bowl on the coffee table, feeling him follow her every move. "Something funny?"

"No, just enjoying the view."

"What, you got a fetish for pregnant women with bedhead wearing pajamas?"

"I have a fetish, but it's a very particular fetish. For a specific, ball-busting, brunette-haired woman, no matter how she looks at any particular moment . . ."

Cuddy felt her cheeks flush, while the low tone of House's voice made her shift on the couch. She looked back toward him, and found that he'd closed the space between them, that slight smile still curving his lips, with the blue of his eyes blazing. "House," she started, with a voice gone quiet due to the sudden dryness of her throat, "I really do need to get to the hospital this morning . . ."

"The hospital can run itself for a morning without you. The Lisa Cuddy I used to know understood when she needed to take a little time from business in order to party. I know that you still know when you've reached your limits . . . you just need to pay attention to yourself."

Particular parts of her body definitely had a different idea about what she should spend the morning doing. But her sense of responsibility still nagged. "House, maybe tonight?"

His fingers trailed up the outside of her leg, and she shivered. "Not tonight . . . tell you what. You stay here until noon, I go to the hospital and do some of my clinic hours this afternoon."

"Just stay here?" she asked, playing dumb to the implications.

"Well. . . ." he grinned at her.

"You're trading sex for clinic hours?"

"Yup."

Outrage and lust warred for a moment, and lust won. "Accepted," she sighed, leaning forward toward him.

He laughed, and tangled his hands in her already-tousled hair, then began kissing her with a desperation his calm manipulation a few moments before had barely hinted at. His lips were rough against hers, his tongue demanding entry. She moaned against his lips, feeling an answering desperation rising within her. His hands left her hair and traveled up under her pajama top, cupping her loose breasts, his thumbs tracing around her nipples. She gasped as her nipples responded, sending a shiver of mixed pain and pleasure through her entire body. He flicked his thumbs across them, and she exhaled sharply.

"No bra . . . " he whispered. "Do you know how hot I find the idea of you without a bra?"

She pulled back a bit and looked at his face, focusing on the intense blue of his eyes. "I always figured you for a black lace man."

"Black lace, red lace, no lace . . . on you, Cuddy, anything or nothing is hot."

"Good to know."

His thumbs flicked across her nipples again, and she threw her head back and whimpered, her hips thrusting forward involuntarily. He pulled her closer to him, into a position where she was straddling his good leg. Even through her panties and pajama pants, the pressure of his leg against her felt so good that she felt herself starting to lose control, rubbing against him like some horny teenager who was too repressed or scared to go further.

He brought both his hands down to her hips, stopping her. She rolled her hips against the pressure, silently pleading.

He kissed his way from her mouth to her earlobe, and then gently sucked it for a moment. "Patience, patience," he whispered. "You owe me two hours here."

A giggle rose inside her. "Two hours? You going to last two hours?"

"Perhaps if I find some little blue friends around here . . . "

"Unless you've got them, there's none to be found around here." Her leg gently brushed against evidence of his arousal, and she continued "Not that you need them . . ."

He groaned and shifted her weight away. "Not yet . . . I wanna give the twins some attention here."

In one movement, he pulled her pajama top over her head, exposing her breasts to the cool air. Her nipples tightened even further, again sending a mixture of pain and pleasure spiking through her, before he covered them with the warmth of the palms of his hands. He began to gently massage them, watching her her closely.

She found herself thrusting her chest forward, firmly against the gentle roughness of his hands. He smiled again, and said "ah, not quite so sensitive today?" Then he removed his hand from her right breast, once again exposing it for a moment to the cool air, before he bent his head to it and drew the nipple into his mouth.

He sucked it deeply inside his mouth, the pressure sending waves of pleasure through her. Then his tongue began to tease her nipple, flicking back and forth in a way similar to how his thumb was treating the other, but the warmth and the additional pressure made her want to scream with both pleasure and anticipation. She found herself grinding against his leg again, felt with a slight twinge of embarrassment that she'd become wet enough to dampen both her panties and pajama bottoms. Then his other hand left her left breast, and traveled down, under the elastic waistband of her pants and panties, his fingers pressing firmly against her clitoris.

She jerked forward at the pressure of his fingers, and he suddenly stopped suckling her breast. He kissed his way down her breast, his lips pausing for a moment against the top of her rounding stomach, and then he withdraw his hand and pushed her off his leg, back into the cushions of the couch. As she lay there, gasping, he pulled her pants and panties down her legs and his mouth continued its journey, lower, lower . . .

He laid a kiss on her lower belly, then gently traced his mouth and tongue down toward where she wanted it to be. Almost too gently, until she thrust her hips forward again and moaned. He spread her folds with his fingers and began teasing her clit, alternating lapping and sucking. Then his tongue entered her as he continued to suck her clit, and she lost herself in the flood of pleasure.

The orgasm shook her to her core, the contractions of her inner muscles echoing all the way up through her belly. She found herself covering her mouth with her right hand, suppressing the noises she was unable to otherwise control. As her body settled down and she regained a slight bit of control, she found House had drawn back and was watching her, two of his fingers now inside her, gently stroking through the fading waves.

He withdrew his fingers, and after making sure that she was watching him, sucked them clean. Then he bent forward and kissed her again, his tongue probing deeply into her mouth, the remaining saltiness of her mixed with his normal taste. For another moment, she traced her tongue along his, tasting, sharing, enjoying.

She drew back from the kiss gasping, already on the brink of being aroused again. Through his boxers, she could see the evidence of his own arousal, the need not satisfied yet. She reached up and pushed at his shoulders, indicating that he should lay back against the far side of the couch. For once, he obeyed.

He settled back against the other arm of the couch, freeing her from under him. She pulled his boxers down his hips, his legs, freeing him from its constraints. His cock stood at attention, and she bent forward and took it in her mouth.

She drew him deeply into her mouth, relaxing her throat, then drew back. For a moment, she sucked at just the head, then again pulled him as deeply inside as she felt he could go.

As she again returned to sucking at the head, he groaned deeply and brought his hand to her chin. She released him, and looked up at him. "Just warning you, if you continue . . . "

"What do you want?"

"I want to come inside you."

She smiled down at him, then moved herself forward, until she was straddling him. She lowered herself onto him, feeling him slowly enter her, even just that leaving her on the edge. For the briefest moment, she wondered at her own sensitivity, then House threw his head back into the cushions and his hands grabbed her hips, pulling her down firmly.

Gasping with the sensation, she began to move herself up and down his cock, her speed directed by his hands. Each time she came down, her clit rubbed against him, sending another long dart of pleasure through her body. His fingers dug into her hips, the force of his hands pulling and pushing, pulling and pushing. Then, as she fully embraced him one last time, his hips went rigid beneath her, and she felt his cock pulse inside her. That sent her over the edge, and she collapsed forward onto him, this time allowing herself to voice her pleasure.

She tucked her face against the hollow between his shoulder and neck, inhaling the mixture of soap and sweat that scented his skin. His chest rose and fell quickly under hers, his fingers lightly resting against the small of her back, as he too started to recover. As she once again started to feel the cool air of the room against the skin of her back, goosebumps rose under his fingertips. He rubbed at them gently, then reached over and snagged the fleece throw blanket she had draped across the back of the couch, covering both of them.

Warm under the blanket, warm against his chest, she closed her eyes for a moment and just breathed. She shifted slightly to move any weight away from his bad leg, her hip sliding down to rest against the couch, and he tightened his arms around her to prevent her from falling off the couch. Her head now laying against his shoulder and upper arm, his chin resting against the top of her head, she felt both unwilling and unable to move. She felt safe, that right now, nothing else in the world mattered. And as she wondered at that feeling, she felt herself again slipping into sleep, and couldn't figure out any reason why she needed to prevent it.


	16. Chapter 15

It felt like only moments later when she was startled back into awareness by fingers gently tickling her lower stomach. "Wakey, wakey, wakey . . ." a low voice mumbled in her ear.

She shifted, and found her muscles stiffer than a few minutes rest even in a strange position should have resulted in. "House?" she mumbled in a half-asleep tone of voice, blinking sleep out of her eyes and turning her head to look at him.

"While I think that you could do with a Saturday hanging out on a couch, you said you wanted to be at the hospital by noon," he said, again flicking his fingers lightly against the bare skin of her lower stomach, then tracing them a slight bit lower, before withdrawing them completely. "Is an hour to shower, dress and drive cutting it close?"

"An hour?" she asked, sitting up quickly and looking toward the clock in the room. The blanket fell away from her and she grabbed at it hastily, suddenly feeling a both a bit awkward, and a bit silly that she'd feel awkward in front of House, given that she'd been apparently sleeping for almost two hours naked and cuddled against him.

The clock was just approaching 11 o'clock. Barely enough time to get completely ready and drive to the hospital, but enough time. She looked down at the naked House lounging on her couch, and said, "I recall you're coming with me?"

"I'd hoped you'd forget that," he said, stretching his arms above his head. She stood, keeping the blanket wrapped around her, and he swung his legs to the floor and tried to stand up, groaning in the process. "Can I plead pain and stiffness?"

"You don't look that stiff," she remarked, as she peered down at a particular part of his anatomy.

"Ha, ha, ha," he responded, and offered her his hand.

She helped pull him to his feet, losing the blanket in the process. He once again used his eyes to trace her body from hips, to breasts, to face, focusing back on her with a half-leering grin. "No need to hide under that blanket." Then he continued, "can I steal a few minutes in a pounding and hot shower?"

Although her second bathroom had a shower, and she could perfectly well have offered that to him, the impulsive and lustful part of her brain that too often took control when House was near her and naked, spoke up. "We can share."

"You really want to get me in there to do those clinic hours."

"I held up my end of the bargain."

"And more."

"Just a shower." She wagged her finger at him, then turned and started walking toward her bedroom.

"It always starts as just a shower . . ."

* * *

A few minutes after noon, they walked together through the front doors of Princeton-Plainsboro, she feeling ready to face whatever the nurses at the front desk had for her, he acting like he was actually looking forward to his clinic hours. She had offered to drop him off at his place to change into fresh clothing, half-expecting that he would not make it the rest of the way to the hospital, but he'd instead opted to ride with her to the hospital, mumbling something about the hospital, a change of clothing, and scrubs.

Just after they walked through the door and before they separated, he pointed his finger at her. "Five o'clock," he stated.

"What about five o'clock?" she asked.

"At five o'clock, I expect a ride out of here. No later."

"You can take a taxi . . ."

"Nope, you leave at five o'clock."

"We'll see about that."

"Exactly."

With that, he headed off in the direction of the locker room, and she headed over to the front desk. While some part of her wanted to test him, to see exactly what he'd dared do if she wasn't ready to leave at five o'clock, the more rational part of her brain set the deadline and started planning the things she needed to accomplish this afternoon.

The receptionist at the front desk was staring after House with a slightly quizzical look on her face, but she returned her attention to the piles of paperwork in front of her as Cuddy approached. "Dr. Cuddy," she greeted her. "Dr. Sandberg has called four times since nine o'clock this morning, insisting that he needs to speak with you directly."

Cuddy looked at the pile of pink call slips on top of a pile of file folders, and noticed there were more than four slips. "Any good news in that pile?"

"Not that I know of."

"Put Dr. Sandberg through to my desk next time he calls." Damned if she was going to call him back and grovel for not being in at nine on a Saturday.

"Will do."

Cuddy took the pile of folders and call slips she was handed, and headed off toward her office. Luckily, there was nobody haunting outside her office door this morning. Not even Sandberg was obsessed enough to drive in and track her down in person, when he could harass her from the comfort of his own home on a cold and icy Saturday.

She sorted out the call slips and tossed the ones noting Sandberg's calls into the trash, then organized the three others from other board members in a neat line in front of her. Unless they had unknown benefactors she could attempt to call, she really didn't want to listen to the ideas any of them had. What were the chances that any of them had come up with ideas on who to fund-raise from or places they could cut the budget between last night and this morning? Shaking her head, she swept them all into the trash.

Looking through the pile of file folders in front of her, she found the one that contained the monthly summary of insurance issues, summarized information about what percentage of the patients in the past month had been covered by insurance, what percentage had not, which insurance companies were doing the most brazen 'reject everything and see who screams loudest' dance, how much uninsured care was going uncovered . . . it was a report she hated, but right now, maybe there was more chance of directing the billing office to pressure specific companies playing the refusal game than of finding money anywhere else. She began paging through the report, ignoring the huge total detailing their uninsured care, the number of accounts scheduled to go to collection, the number of requests for charity coverage, focusing only on the insurance details.

A sharp rap sounded from her doorway and she looked up, a bit annoyed that her concentration had been broken so quickly. Although, the sight of House in pale-colored scrubs, covered with a correctly-fitting white coat-now where in the world had he located it?-curbed her annoyance slightly.

He limped over to her desk and tossed a piece of paper on top of the report. It contained a short list of names and numbers jotted hastily down in House's distinctive handwriting, some of them starred. She picked it up, and glanced up at him in confusion.

"Call 'em." he stated. "Give them your song and dance. You probably can mention me to the starred names, otherwise, you might want to focus on the clinic or the effects of the economy on the hospital, or whatever. Some of them might have donated already, I don't know."

With that, he turned and walked out as quickly as his leg would allow him.

She looked at the list of names. Some looked familiar, most did not. Well, she could at least check the names against their fund-raising and donations database.

* * *

At three o'clock, she finally managed to talk an incensed Sandberg off the phone, and decided that she both needed a break and something to eat. She was starting to become too familiar with how quickly she went from being slightly hungry to feeling absolutely ravenous these days.

As she had expected, Sandberg had a lot of hot air to blow, and absolutely no useful suggestions or recommendations. She hoped that perhaps letting him rant at her via her speaker phone while she looked through budget spreadsheets might mean that he kept his suggestions short and to the point when the board re-convened, but she was beginning to believe that he would never shut up until he was either excused from the board or died.

On the other hand, House's list had already proven useful. Once she'd eliminated the few duplicate names from his list, she'd tried calling some of the starred names. One of the first three had resulted in an invitation to come speak with the board of a charitable foundation she'd heard of in passing over the years, but had never considered approaching before. Another had resulted in someone who had set up an appointment to come in and discuss a donation to one of their funds. It was more than she'd managed to accomplish otherwise in recent weeks.

As she exited her office, she glanced over toward the main desk and noticed a couple of nurses, nurse assistants, and the receptionist engaged in an animated discussion. While she wasn't one to forbid workplace chatter, as long as it didn't venture into destructive gossip, this seemed to be a bit more intense than usual. She wandered over toward them, trying to see if she could casually overhear what they were discussing, but one of the nurses she knew well immediately brought her into the conversation.

"Did he lose a bet with you?" Nurse Becky asked her, waving her hand in the general direction of one of the exam rooms for the clinic.

"Lose a bet?"

"Dr. House. Or did you get some great blackmail material on him?"

She choked and coughed at the same time. "What is House doing?"

"He's gone through about 40 patients in under three hours, and he's actually pretending to be civil. Either he's up to something, or you got something."

"I guess I'll have to figure out what he's up to."

She walked away quickly, neither trusting her voice or her face any further, as the group started to speculate about what House was doing. As she waited for the elevator, she saw him emerge from an exam room, a half-smile on his face, and politely trade one folder for another.

Even with the distance between the front desk and the elevators, he caught her eye, tilted his head at the gaggle of gossips, and then gave her one of his patented smirks.

Her elevator arrived and she hastily stepped into it, managing to suppress her desire to laugh loudly until the doors had closed her off from the lobby area.

* * *

As her clock changed over to 4:58pm, Cuddy was hastily sorting through documents that required her signature, trying to figure out which ones she could sign and send on without further review. House stepped through the door into her office, once again dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, his coat tossed over his arm. "Time to go!"

"I have two more minutes left."

"One, actually," he remarked, as the clock again changed.

But he shut her office door then settled down on her couch, apparently willing to wait a few more minutes as she finished up the paperwork she was determined to get through. She tossed a few more files onto the pile she needed to look at again later, added her signature to two more, then shut the file folder. "Okay, done."

He groaned, and settled further into the couch. "Do you know how tiring actually working for five hours is?" he asked with a whining tone.

"Maybe someday, you should try working for eight hours, even ten."

"Now why would I do that?"

She rolled her eyes at him, and stood up to gather her briefcase and coat. Grabbing that last file folder off her desk, she started to head toward the door. "Hey, you're the one that insisted we were out the door at five."

"I insisted we be done with work at five."

"I think there are places I'd rather be than this office."

"Got any ideas?"

"We could grab some dinner, go to a movie, you know, normal Saturday night things. Or even just stop somewhere for coffee and sandwiches before heading home."

He regarded her steadily. "I'd define those as Saturday night date things."

"You could characterize those suggestions that way."

"You asking me out?"

"I guess that I am." She opened the door and headed out, walking toward the front desk and the inter-campus mail box there.

Behind her, she heard House heave himself to his feet and follow, as her actions dared him to continue their conversation in the halls of the hospital.

"Dinner and a movie sound like something that boring, everyday people do."

"Right now, boring and everyday sounds just fine to me."

"Okay, then."

"You coming?"

"I guess that I am."

She handed off the file folder to the person currently manning the front desk, noting with a slight bit of relief that it didn't appear to be anyone she recognized and that the lobby area was mainly empty.

While some part of her was getting a bit tired of the formal distance they had been keeping within hospital walls, another part of her knew that on top of everything else, neither she nor House needed the rumors of a relationship complicating matters right now. But she had intentionally drawn him out into the lobby during the course of a conversation about a possible date. She found that she didn't want to look at her motives closely.

They walked out the doors quietly, side-by-side, as they often had in the past. To anyone watching, it was probably unremarkable. Somehow, they often ended up leaving at the same time, walking out together.

As the back of his hand lightly brushed against hers, she resisted the temptation to take hold of it, to intertwine their fingers. They would be at the parking garage and her car in a few minutes, perhaps stopping somewhere for dinner soon after that. Plenty of time away from the hospital to engage in whatever romantic tendencies she might have, and he might be willing to tolerate.


End file.
